Elizabeth B. Bryant

Elizabeth Bangs Bryant (April 7, 1875 – January 6, 1953) was an American arachnologist. She worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was a close acquaintance of James Henry Emerton. She is best known for her studies of the spiders of New England and the Caribbean.

Elizabeth was born to a wealthy Boston family and attended Radcliffe College. She would have graduated with the Radcliffe class of 1897 but left after only three years without finishing her degree.

She started her work at the Museum of Comparative Zoology as a volunteer in 1898. In the 1930s she was promoted the assistant curator of spiders and received a small salary. Her work included collections care of the wet specimens as well as taxonomic research. She officially retired from the museum in 1950 but continued to work on the spider collections until her death.

After her death, a memorial written by her colleague and friend, Elisabeth Deichmann, described her as having a proper sedate exterior that hid a youthful spirit. In her youth she took part in collecting trips in New England and had a substantial personal spider collection that she donated to the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Provided by Wikipedia