Anthony Curtiss

Anthony Curtiss, pen name of Roy Abijah Curtiss Jr (born in Brooklyn, New York 10 May 1910, died 12 July 1981 in Karachi, Pakistan), also known in his later life as Muhammad Abdullah al-Hussein, was an American naturalist who wrote a short, and somewhat eccentric, book on the zoology of Tahiti.

Early life Roy Abijah Curtiss Jr. was born on 19 May 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Roy Abijah Curtiss (1880-1923), a wealthy business man who was the son and heir of Frank Curtiss former president of New York's Sixth Street Elevated Railway Society and Ethel Grace Quinn (1885-1974). His parents had married in 1907 and Roy was the oldest of their four boys. The family had an estate near Sheffield, Massachusetts and a town house on Eleventh Avenue near the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). printing costs probably being met by his mother and grandmother, entitled An account of the natural history of New England and of Nova Scotia and lower Canada of the islands of the coasts between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Bay of New York; of the mountains wherein in Hudson rises; and all eastward as far as the Bay of Massachusetts. in so far as it applies to beasts, birds, reptiles, whales, fresh and salt water fish and shellfish, worms, insects and pests. Curtiss’s parents divorced in 1921 and his father died in 1923 leaving Curtiss and two of his brothers an equal share in his estate and a trust fund. His other two brothers, Sidney Curtiss and Franklin Curtiss, were politicians in Massachusetts. There is a portrait of his mother painted by the Welsh artist Augustus John (1878-1961) in 1931.

Travels and Natural History Curtiss had traveled with his mother to France and in the late 1920s he signed on as a cook on a Portuguese ship. In early 1930s he journeyed to South America and in 1934 he went to Tahiti. He stayed in Tahiti for 5 years in the village of Tuatira on Tahiti Iti, the remote and rugged southeastern peninsula of the island. He married a local girl there and donated funds to improve the infrastructure connecting Tuatira with the island’s capital, Papeete. Among the few scientists who referred to the work was Henry Weed Fowler in his Fishes of Oceania published in 1949. Curtiss dedicated the book to his 17 year old wife, Rai-a-Hitorea. Panolopus curtissi (Grant, 1951), also known commonly as Curtiss' galliwasp, Curtis's galliwasp, and the Hispaniolan khaki galliwasp, is a species of lizard in the family Diploglossidae endemic to the island of Hispaniola and surrounding islets.