Karl F. Koopman was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 1, 1920, the son and first of two children of Martha (Brown) Koopman and Karl H.  Koopman (his sister Elinor was born two years later).  Karl passed away at his apartment on Manhattan's upper West Side sometime between Saturday afternoon, September 20 and Monday, September 22, 1997, at the age of 77.  Karl had just returned from the Seventh International Theriological Congress in Mexico and had spent Saturday morning in his office at the American Museum of Natural History.  Undoubtedly, he scanned his accumulated mail and messages, organized his research for the following week, and planned his upcoming trip to Tucson, Arizona, to attend the 27th Annual North American Symposium on Bat Research.  Colleagues who saw him that final morning in the museum detected nothing amiss. 

As a child, Karl attended public schools in the Los Angeles area but moved to Red Hook, New York for high school, his father having joined the faculty at Bard College.  Karl's lifelong interest in the natural history of reptiles, birds, and mammals was first developed among the exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.  Karl enjoyed nearly all of his high school science classes, and entered Columbia University intending to major in Chemistry.  However, courses at Columbia such as those taught by W. K. Gregory, E. H. Colbert, and G. G. Simpson entitled "Evolution of the Vertebrates" and "Mammals, Living and Fossil" changed his mind, and he graduated in 1943 with a B.A. in Zoology.  He continued at Columbia as a graduate student, earning the M.A. in 1945 and the Ph.D. in 1950.  Genetics was a "hot" topic at Columbia in those years, and Karl elected to pursue graduate study with Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the early pioneers in genetic studies using fruit flies.  Karl's doctoral thesis tested the hypothesis that artificial selection against the hybrids of two closely-related sister species--Drosophila pseudoobscura and D. persimilis--would strengthen incipient premating isolating mechanisms.  The paper resulting from this study was his first published work (1950), appearing in an early volume of the journal Evolution.  It is one of very few of Karl's publications that are not on bats, and the only one not on vertebrates.  It is still widely cited today as an early experimental verification of natural selection. 

Although he studied fruit flies as a graduate student, Karl continued to be fascinated by the natural history of mammals, and particularly bats.  He spent a great deal of time at the American Museum of Natural History, where he interacted with fellow graduate students Max Hecht, Samuel McDowell, Rodolfo Ruibal, and Ernest Williams.  His first work on mammals was a collaboration with Williams on West Indian fossil monkeys, rodents, and bats in the summer of 1949.  This began nearly a decade of seminal work on West Indian bats, culminating in two important papers: "Land bridges and ecology in bat distribution on islands off the northern coast of South America" in Evolution (1958) and "The zoogeographical limits of the West Indies" in the Journal of Mammalogy (1959).  Karl often expressed his wonder at how the interest in bat systematics and zoogeography increased during his lifetime.  Very few colleagues know or cared about bats when he began to study them.  Certainly the explosion of interest in West Indies vertebrates that began in the 1960s was in part attributable to increased government funding for scientific research, but Karl's papers played an important role, inspiring at least two generations of mammalogists to examine this zoogeographically fascinating and important region. 

Following completion of his degree, Karl taught for one year (1949-1950) at the Middletown Collegiate Center, and for six years as Instructor in Biology at Queen's College in New York.  He then became an Assistant Curator of Mammals, first at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia for one year (1958-1959) and then at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  In 1961, he returned to the Mammalogy Department of the American Museum of Natural History as Assistant Curator, reaching the rank of Associate Curator in 1966, Curator in 1978, and Curator Emeritus in 1985. 

During his last year in Chicago and the first few in New York, Karl's interests expanded to include African and South American bats.  His reanalysis of the taxonomy of Congo bats (1965) began a series of important papers on systematics and zoogeography of African Chiroptera that continued up to nearly the time of his death.  Notable among the series are his papers on bats of Sudan (1975, 1986), Liberia (1989), and West Africa (with Mumford and Heisterberg, 1978).  As his interests expanded further, he added major systematic and zoogeographic treatments of bats of South America, Australia and the Indo-Malay region, the Pacific Islands, and other regions.  Ultimately, Karl became a recognized authority on bat genera and species worldwide, and though he continued to publish regional studies throughout his professional life, he began to be asked to contribute chapters or monographs on all chiropteran species.  More recent examples of this sort of paper include the chapter on bats in the 1984 Orders and Families of Recent Mammals of the World (edited by S. Anderson and J. K. Jones, Jr.), a series of papers summarizing the living families of bats in Bat Research News (1982-1985), the chapter on bat families, genera and species in the 1993 Mammal Species of the World (D. E. Wilson and D. M. Reeder, eds.), and his monumental 1994 "Chiroptera: Systematics" monograph, which appeared in the Handbuch der Zoologie series. 

Karl traveled extensively in his lifetime to attend scientific meetings, study at museums around the world, and collect specimens.  He completely circled the Earth at least twice in his travels.  Though he admitted that he was not principally a field biologist, Karl collected bats in Jamaica, the Lesser Antilles, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia, and in Kruger National Park in South Africa.  To the delight of comparative morphologists worldwide (myself included), Karl was not exclusively a practitioner of the "skin and skull" school of museum specimen preparation.  He generally preserved at least half of each series he collected in alcohol, believing that much valuable information was lost when most of a specimen was discarded.  He also developed a unique method of extracting skulls from alcoholic specimens--a technique which amazed anyone who watched him in that it did almost no damage to the rest of the specimen.  A number of individuals have attempted to learn his technique, with varying degrees of success.  Unfortunately, the fine details of the Koopman skull extraction technique may have been lost with Koopman. 

Karl attended every annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists since his first one in 1954, and presented papers or posters at a number of meetings.  He served on the Board of Directors of the Society, and as a member of the Nomenclature, Checklist, and Editorial committees.  He was an Associate Editor of Mammalian Species when he died, with principal responsibility for synonymy of genera and species (he will be sorely missed and difficult to replace in that capacity alone).  For his meritorious service to the Society, Karl received the Hartley H. T. Jackson Award in June 1988.  For his outstanding contributions to the science of mammalogy, Karl was made an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mammalogists in June 1990.  Karl was also active in the smaller, more informally organized North American Bat Research Society.  Since the second meeting in 1971, he attended every one of the North American Symposia on Bat Research.  Ironically, he seemed destined not to attend a bat meeting in Tucson, AZ.  He missed the first held in Tucson in 1970 because no one told him about it, and the most recent one, which finally returned after 26 years to Tucson, because of his death.  In 1977, at the eighth annual meeting in Ottawa, Canada, the members of the bat society paid Karl their highest honor by presenting the Gerrit S. Miller Jr. Award to him. 

Karl gave cheerfully and unstintingly of his time and knowledge of mammalogy to all who sought him out, from the most senior of his colleagues to the greenest of graduate students.  He willingly served on a number of doctoral committees, including those of Patricia Freeman, Tom Griffiths, Sam McDowell, James Dale Smith, and Fred Szalay.  He mentored dozens of pre- and postdoctoral visitors to the American Museum, and shared specimens, data, and his own knowledge with colleagues from around the world.  He was a skilled debater.  No one who attended the Fifth International Bat Research Conference in Albuquerque will forget the "Great Debate" between Karl and J. D. Smith on the monophyly of the Chiroptera (Karl took the affirmative, of course).  The coffee room on the fifth floor of the American Museum was the site of a number of fascinating post-lunch discussion-debates on systematics, in which Karl often participated enthusiastically.  His knowledge of geography was profound.  He could easily recall in conversation an obscure portion of a river system, desert, or mountain range and discuss it in such detail that it seemed as if an atlas was open in front of him.  His sense of humor was droll.  He was a passionate (tongue-in-cheek) supporter of global warming, suggesting that a warmer Earth would allow considerable extensions of the ranges of some of his favorite species.  When the Queen of England visited the hotel where the bat meetings were held, in Ottawa, Canada in 1977, nearly everyone except Karl was excited to see the Queen close up.  When questioned about this, he responded that his ancestors had "fought a war so that--[he]--wouldn't HAVE to be excited about that monarchy!" 

Very few individuals in modem times have managed to make a specialty of all bats; fewer still have had the profound influence that Karl has had on taxonomy, systematics, and zoogeography of bats.  He was a good friend, colleague, and mentor to many people, and he will be greatly missed. 

102. A second species of Carollia from Trinidad. Bat Research News, 38:4-5 (with A. M. Greenhall).