William Douglas Burden

William Douglas Burden (September 24, 1898 – November 14, 1978),[1] was an American naturalist, filmmaker, and author who co-founded Marineland in Florida.

Burden was born on September 24, 1898, in Troy, New York, but grew up in Manhattan, where the family lived at 7 East 91st Street in a home designed by Warren & Wetmore.

[8][9] After his father's death in 1932, his mother remarried in 1936 to Richard M. Tobin,[10] a banker who had been the American Minister to the Netherlands under President Calvin Coolidge.

[17][18] His sister, Adele Burden Lawrence, married the prominent writer Louis Stanton Auchincloss.

[21][22] Shortly after graduating from Harvard,[23] Burden went to the Far East on an expedition to bring back specimens for the American Museum of Natural History which led to the establishment of the Department of Animal Behavior in 1928.

Along with his first wife Catherine and their party, he went looking for the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), which the New York Times called a "fierce direct descendant of the dinosaur".

Of the three Komodo dragons they captured, two were given to the Bronx Zoo, but died soon thereafter and were mounted in the new Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians at the museum.

[25] Along with Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Sherman Pratt, and Ilya Andreyevich Tolstoy (grandson of Leo Tolstoy), Burden founded and served as president of Marineland, one of Florida's first marine mammal parks in St. Augustine, Florida in 1938.

[43] Through his son Andrew, he was a grandfather of Princeton University graduate William Douglas Burden III (b.