Raymond Robert Forster

Raymond Robert Forster (19 June 1922 – 1 July 2000) was a New Zealand arachnologist and museum director. He was a Fellow of The Entomological Society of New Zealand.

Biography Forster was born in Hastings, New Zealand in 1922, and was educated at Victoria University College, gaining BSc, MSc(Hons) and DSc degrees.

Forster was an entomologist at the National Museum in Wellington from 1940 to 1947, with an interruption for military service during World War II. He was appointed zoologist and assistant director at Canterbury Museum in 1948. Forster was one of the zoologists studying invertebrates on the 1949 New Zealand American Fiordland Expedition. He was a marine biologist on the 1954 Chatham Islands expedition. In 1957, Forster moved to Otago Museum to take up the position of director. He retired from that role in 1987.

He researched and classified many of New Zealand's thousands of native spiders, and was responsible for establishing Otago Museum's spider collection.

Forster was also elected a Fellow of the Entomological Society of New Zealand.

Honorific eponym A small valley in Fiordland, Forster Burn, is named after him.