Charles Richard Taylor

Charles Richard Taylor (September 8, 1939 – September 10, 1995) was an American biologist whose career focused on animal physiology. After conducting work in east Africa, Taylor became the Charles P. Lyman professor of biology at Harvard University and was named first director the University's Concord Field Station. Taylor was elected to the American National Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Early life

C. Richard (Dick) Taylor was born in Tempe, Arizona in 1939 to Rosalind and Norman Taylor, a Methodist minister. Richard was the third of four sons. In 1941 the family moved to Los Angeles, where Taylor attended public high schools and then admitted to Occidental College. Taylor completed his bachelor's degree in biology in 1960. Shortly thereafter he published his first paper in the journal Nature with biologist Jack W. Hudson, on blood uric acid buildup in flying birds.

Director of Harvard's Concord Field Station

In 1970, Taylor returned to Harvard as a faculty member in the Department of Biology and became the first faculty Director of the Harvard's new Concord Field Station (CFS) located in Bedford, Massachusetts established from an abandoned 1960s Nike missile facility. Taylor directed research at the CFS using both wild and domesticated animals for the next two-and-a-half decades. and that horses change their gait to minimize their energy cost of transport.

In collaboration with Giovanni Cavagna and Norman Heglund, Taylor showed that walking and running involve two different energy saving strategies: an inverted pendulum to exchange center of mass (CoM) potential and kinetic energy during walking and a mass-spring mechanism to store and recover elastic energy from the legs to the CoM during running. In a series of papers, they also showed that the mechanical work involved in moving an animal's limbs and its body CoM did not scale with body size as was observed for the metabolic cost of locomotion. Using the first force-platform treadmill, Taylor and his student Rodger Kram showed that the scaling of metabolic cost of terrestrial locomotion better correlated with the rate and magnitude of force exerted by an animal's limbs on the ground. Over a productive 10 year span (1979-1989), Taylor also collaborated with Swiss morphologist Ewald Weibel and his research group to explore structure-function scaling relationships between locomotion energetics and morphological design features underlying the transport of oxygen by the cardio-respiratory system to the muscles during exercise, which they termed symmorphosis.

Taylor died of a heart attack in 1995.