Van Dyke was born in Oakland, California, on April 7, 1869. His father,
Walter Van Dyke, came from New York and traveled cross-country to California during the
gold rush in 1849. His mother, Rowena Cooper, came by ship to California in 1850. The couple married in 1854 and Walter went on to a successful career as lawyer, judge, and State Supreme Court justice. Van Dyke went to school in Oakland and began collecting insects while in high school. In 1885 his family moved to Los Angeles where he continued to collect and study insects. He became acquainted with
Daniel Coquillett, an entomologist working as a field agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Coquillett taught Van Dyke the correct methods of collecting and preparing an insect collection, gave him specimens and took him along on collecting trips. In 1890 Van Dyke made his first collecting trip to Yosemite Valley which he reached via pack train. In 1892, he published his first paper, "Butterflies of Yosemite". Van Dyke traveled and collected extensively throughout the Western United States. He was considered the foremost expert on beetles of the region. He was especially interested in the habitats of beetles and their distribution in North America. He described more than 400 species, focusing in particular on five families:
Carabidae,
Meloidae,
Elateridae,
Buprestidae, and
Curculionidae. In 1923-1924 he collected in China, Manchuria, and Japan; in 1933 he visited Europe and Egypt. In addition, he was an expert on the insect pests in the forestry industry and authored a textbook on the topic,
Forest Insects (1936). During his career he published 153 papers. Van Dyke died on September 28, 1952. His insect collection of some 200,000 specimens was donated to the California Academy of Sciences. ==Publications==