Alpheus Hyatt II was born in Washington, D.C. to Alpheus Hyatt and Harriet Randolph (King) Hyatt. He briefly attended the
Maryland Military Academy and
Yale University, and after graduating from Harvard University in 1862, he enlisted as a private in the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry for the Civil War, emerging with the rank of captain. , where Hyatt set up his marine biology laboratory After the war he worked for a time at the Essex Institute (now the
Peabody Essex Museum in
Salem, Massachusetts. He and a colleague founded
American Naturalist and Hyatt served as editor from 1867 to 1870. He became a professor of
paleontology and
zoology at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1870, where he taught for eighteen years, and was professor of biology and zoology at
Boston University from 1877 until his death in 1902. He also served as curator of the
Boston Society of Natural History, where his longtime assistant was his former student
Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon, and he established a laboratory at the
Norwood-Hyatt House in 1879 for the study of
Marine Biology in
Annisquam, Massachusetts. The River Road building gave him access to the Annisquam River, a salt water estuary. This enterprise was moved to Woods Hole and became the Woods Hole
Marine Biological Laboratory in 1888. Hyatt studied under
Louis Agassiz and was a proponent of
Neo-Lamarckism with
Edward Drinker Cope. In 1869, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a fellow and in 1875, he was elected a member of the
National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1895. In 1898, he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from
Brown University. He and his wife, Audella Beebe, were the parents of famed sculptor
Anna Hyatt Huntington; their other children were
Harriet Randolph Hyatt Mayor, who was a less well known sculptor (and mother of the art historian
A. Hyatt Mayor), and Alpheus Hyatt III.
Neo-Lamarckism Hyatt's views on the evolution of species was expressed in his 1866 paper on
On the Parallelism between the Different Stages of Life in the Individual and Those in the Entire Group of the Molluscous Order Tetrabranchiata. In this he claimed that extinction of a species was analogous to death of individual organisms. He proposed that there was an acceleration and a deceleration in the number of species over time which preceded extinction. The movement toward this Neo-Lamarckian understanding was supported by Edward Drinker Cope and Alpheus S. Packard. They were joined by
Wiilliam H. Dall,
Thomas Meehan,
Joel A. Allen,
Clarence King,
Joseph Le Conte, and
Henry Fairfield Osborn. ==Publications==