(born 1934). American ornithologist and zoologist Alan Brush studied the chemistry of bird feathers and claws and reptile scales. The genes that control the development of such structures were key in his investigations. By comparing the chemistry and genetics of feathers with those of claws, finches with quails, and modern birds with living crocodiles and extinct dinosaurs, he helped other scientists understand the evolution of birds.
Alan Howard Brush was born in Rochester, New York, on September 29, 1934. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1956, he spent the next eight years at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as a doctoral student, research technician, and teaching assistant. His work in ornithology, or the study of birds, brought him awards from the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1963 and the Cooper Ornithological Society in 1964, as well as a predoctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He received his Ph.D. in zoology from UCLA in 1964 with a dissertation on activity and heart responses in the California quail.
Brush spent a postdoctoral year on zoology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on another NIH fellowship. In 1965 he joined the zoology faculty of the University of Connecticut as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1969 and professor in 1976. Fellowships took him to the University of California at Berkeley in 1971–72 and to a laboratory in Melbourne, Australia, in 1976–77. Brush edited The Auk for the American Ornithologists’ Union from 1983 to 1991.
Brush researched birds during his tenure at the university and continued his research even after his retirement in 1993. The pigments, shapes, and proteins of bird feathers were recurrent subjects in his research. Exploring the implications of evolution, he found that reptile scales are less closely related to feathers than to the scales on the bottom of birds’ toes. His many publications included “The Evolution of Feathers” in Avian Biology (1993) and “On the Origin of Feathers” in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (1996).
When Chinese paleontologists reported finding a dinosaur fossil that seemed to have feathers, Brush became part of the select team that the Academy of Natural Sciences sent to China in March 1997 to examine the fossil firsthand. Brush concluded that though the hairlike structures on the fossil’s spine were not feathers, they did resemble other bird features such as eyelashes and bristles around the mouth.
Brush was elected vice president of the American Ornithologists’ Union (now the American Ornithological Society) in 2004. He stepped down from that position in 2012.