Ursula Cowgill

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ursula Moser Cowgill (9 November 1927 – November 27, 2015)

AIDS. She also looked after four pottos for many years and published a series of observations on their behaviour.[3]

Cowgill earned a

limnologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson
. Her first journal articles, some published jointly with Hutchinson, appeared in the early 1960s.

Cowgill was living in Colorado as of 2003. In addition to her scientific research, she was an activist with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Work and findings

Pottos

In 1959, three pairs of pottos from West Africa arrived at Yale's Osborn Zoological Laboratory. At first they lived in the laboratory with a number of other

nocturnal prosimians
that Cowgill and Hutchinson were studying. In 1964, Cowgill took two of the pairs to live with her. She looked after them until 1981, when she gave the sole surviving male to a colleague.

While the pottos were with her, Cowgill published a number of journal articles on their anatomy, diet, reproduction, illnesses and recovery, and social behaviour. These publications constitute one of the few long-term studies of pottos in captivity.

Maya agriculture

Between 1961 and 1963, Cowgill and Hutchinson made studies of

pre-Columbian Maya civilization.[4]
Their findings reported that Maya cultivation methods had gradually robbed the soil of vital elements, meaning that it eventually became unable to sustain crops. Some scholars have linked this exhaustion of the soil to the 10th-century decline of the Maya urban settlements in the Petén region.

Sex ratio and childhood mortality

Cowgill's research into gender and child mortality covered both historical records in England and contemporary observations in Guatemala. Using birth and death records from the parish registers of York between 1538 and 1812, Cowgill found that throughout the city's history, girls at every stage of childhood had died at a higher rate than boys of the same age. This resulted in an adult sex ratio of 136 males for every 100 females. Cowgill theorised that this was partly because girls were more likely to be victims of infanticide, and partly because sons tended to receive better feeding and care than daughters.[5]

In

survival mechanism
.

Seasons of birth

Cowgill undertook one of the first scientific studies of seasonality in human reproduction. Taking data from historical records and indigenous peoples in various countries, she concluded that conception and birth in human beings, like that of many other animals, followed seasonal patterns to a degree. Because the pattern was different in the

urbanised and industrialised
areas the pattern had been disrupted. Her 1966 article on the topic, published in the journal Ecology, has formed the basis for subsequent research by other scientists.

Selenium and AIDS

In 1997, Cowgill gauged the selenium content of soil in various locations in the

African-Americans
.

Publications

References

  1. ^ Full name and date of birth information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF). Retrieved on 2008-05-08.
  2. ^ "Ursula Moser Cowgill Obituary (2016) New York Times". Legacy.com.
  3. ^ "Ursula Moser Cowgill's Obituary". New York Times. Retrieved 24 May 2018.
  4. ISBN 9781607323921
    .
  5. PMID 22077570
    .
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ursula_Cowgill&oldid=1159000287"