Portal:Gastropods/Selected biography/5

David Dwight Baldwin (1831–1912) was a businessman, educator, and biologist on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. Within biology he is known for his contributions to the study of Hawaiian land snails, the terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks of the Hawaiian Islands.

Baldwin was born on November 26, 1831 in Honolulu. His father was early missionary doctor Dwight Baldwin (1798–1886), and his mother was Charlotte Fowler Baldwin (1805–1873). After a few years living in Waimea, the family moved to the island of Maui in about 1837. Baldwin lived in Connecticut for a time and received both his undergraduate degree and a Master of Arts from Yale.

In 1890, he moved to Haʻikū, where his younger brother Henry Perrine Baldwin (1842–1911) had founded the agricultural venture Alexander & Baldwin with his brother-in-law Samuel Thomas Alexander (1836–1904). At this time Baldwin devoted much of his efforts to studying mollusks, i.e. to malacology, specifically the study of Hawaiian land snails, some of which he named and described. In addition, several land snail species in the family Achatinellidae were named in honor of him, as well as a subgenus Baldwinia of the genus Partulina. He produced the first catalog of Hawaiian land snails and freshwater snails in 1893. (Read more...)