"On a warm August 30 in Roslyn, NY in the year 1922,  a brave  seven year old David Rockefeller picked up an inchlong brown beetle with large pinching mandibles and plunged it into a jar to bring home. That specimen would become the first of some 90,000 beetles in the Rockefeller collection of Coleoptera, today housed in over 500 specially-made hardwood boxes in the wall cabinets at his residence in Pocantico Hills.

Rockefeller has personally collected at least 500 species (approximately 10% of the specimens) from 23 different countries(Algeria, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador, France, French West Indies, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, the USA, Venezuela and Zimbabwe), in every decade since the 1920's. The Rockefeller collections very heavily favor five of the most diverse (and attractive) beetle families, the predatory ground beetles in the family Carabidae, the dung-beetles and june beetles in the family Scarabaeidae, the woodboring beetles in the families Buprestidae and Cerambycidae and the leaf-beetles in the Chrysomelidae, and total over 9,000 species in all.

David Rockefeller's extraordinary collection of beetles will serve as an influential, international model for the digital age of natural history collections, a contribution with elements of many of the scholarly, international and aesthetic enterprises with which the Rockefellers have been so long associated."

-- Brian D. Farrell, On the David Rockefeller Collection of Coleoptera (Beetles).
ReVista Fall 2004/Winter 2005, pages 4-5.


"I first became interested in collecting and studying beetles through Howland Sperry, a teacher of mine at the Lincoln School of Teachers College in New York.

In the late spring of 1934, towards the end of my sophomore year at Harvard College, I received a letter frm Dr. Frank E. Lutz, Entomology Curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, inviting me to join a scientific expedition... to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in Northern Arizona. In the end, we were able to show that species of insects found at the bottom of the canyon along the river were also found in southern Mexico, and other species collected ten thousand feet higher in the San Francisco Peaks were indigenous to Alaska and parts of Canada.

In the years since graduating from Harvard in 1936, I have continued to add to my collection...on an almost weekly basis. It remains a wonderfully satisfying hobby, and through it I have learned a great deal about nature's underlying order and diversity, as well as the interconnectedness of all living things.  I am pleased that my collection will become part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard in the future."

--David Rockefeller. The Natural World, a personal reminiscence.
ReVista Fall 2004/Winter 2005, pages 3-5.

In 1999, Brian Farrell introduced David to his then-doctoral student Geoffrey Morse, expert in the evolution and taxonomy of bruchine seed beetles. Geoff brings his meticulous approach to the curation, databasing and digital photography of this great collection, which continues to be hosted online by the Department of Entomology of the MCZ. Today an assistant professor at Arizona State University, West Campus, Geoff continues the study and care of the David Rockefeller's beetles on regular visits to Pocantico Hills, and together they undertake yearly expeditions to distant countries to add new species to the growing and vibrant Rockefeller Collection of Coleoptera.