Andrew Nelson Caudell

Andrew Nelson Caudell (18 August 1872 – 1 March 1936) was an entomologist who specialized in the study of grasshoppers and other insects in the order Orthoptera, becoming a prolific author of taxonomic studies, a member and president (in 1915) of the Entomological Society of Washington, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Caudell was born August 18, 1872, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a son of Andrew Jackson and Mary Jane (née Bannon) Caudell. Raised in Oklahoma, he completed his Bachelor of Science degree at Oklahoma Territorial Agricultural and Mechanical College in Stillwater, Oklahoma, now Oklahoma State University, and undertook postgraduate study at Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

After a brief employment with the Gypsy Moth Project in Massachusetts, he joined the Division of Insects of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1898 and remained with the department until his death. In addition to his USDA duties, he served as custodian of the Orthoptera collection of the Division of Insects of the United States National Museum, now the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

He married on April 12, 1900, Penelope Cundiff in a unique ceremony performed over telegraph lines with the bride in Mulhall, Oklahoma and the groom in Kansas City, Kansas with the minister and two witnesses, possibly the first such ceremony ever performed.

Caudell died on March 1, 1936, at Washington, D.C. Among other honors, he is memorialized by two pyralid moth taxa published in a single paper by fellow entomologist and co-worker Harrison Gray Dyar Jr., the species Megasis caudellella (Dyar, 1904) and the genus Caudellia (Dyar, 1904) and the tettigoniid grasshopper Conocephalus caudellianus (Davis, 1905), Caudell's conehead.