Anders Gunnar Johannes Rhodin

Anders Gunnar Johannes Rhodin (born December 11, 1949), usually cited as Anders G. J. Rhodin, is Swedish-born American orthopedic surgeon, turtle researcher (testudologist), and conservationist.

Biography

Rhodin is the son of the physician and biologist Johannes Arne Gosta Rhodin (1922–2004). He was born in Sweden and emigrated to the United States in January 1958 at the age of eight. In 1971, he received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. While there, the herpetologist and mammalogist Russell Mittermeier was his roommate. In the same year, the two travelled together to the Amazon basin in search of monkeys and turtles. During a canoe trip with Mittermeier into the wilderness along the Rio Negro, Rhodin was given a small tortoise by an Indigenous family as a pet, an event that helped shape his subsequent scientific and professional career. His interest in caring for the animal grew, as did his desire to learn as much as possible about turtles. He began his medical studies at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, continued them at New York Medical College, and received his M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1977.

Rhodin completed his specialist training in orthopedic surgery at Yale University, where he also conducted comparative anatomical studies of marine mammals and turtles under the mentorship of John A. Ogden. During his time at Yale, he made the significant discovery that leatherback sea turtles possess thick, highly vascularized cartilage, an unusual and important finding that he and his colleagues published in Nature in 1981. He also contributed anatomical and histological evidence for mammal-like rapid bone growth in leatherback turtles and fossil sea turtles, including electron-microscopy research on their cartilage canals carried out with his father.