Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, who wrote as A. Hyatt Verrill, was an American zoologist, illustrator, explorer, archaeologist and prolific author. He was born on July 23, 1871, in New Haven, Connecticut, and died on November 14, 1954. His father, Addison Emery Verrill, was a Yale professor of zoology and a leading authority on marine invertebrates. His name honored the naturalist Alpheus Hyatt, a family connection. He grew up in a scientific household and studied at Yale, where he trained in natural history and developed a strong talent for scientific illustration. Verrill spent much of his early career in the West Indies, Central America and South America. He took part in expeditions to Dominica and elsewhere, collecting specimens, drawing, and studying local peoples and wildlife. He later did fieldwork and collecting in Panama, Peru, Bolivia and other regions. He worked for museums and the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian, and he took part in archaeological work, notably in Panama. He also wrote about Indigenous cultures such as the Kuna of the San Blas coast. Some of his more dramatic claims about lost cities and ancient civilizations were doubted by professional colleagues, and his reputation as a scientist has been debated. He wrote well over one hundred books, along with many magazine articles. They covered natural history, travel, archaeology, marine life, pets, the Americas and popular science, and many were aimed at young readers. He also wrote adventure novels and early science fiction for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. His best-known fiction includes Beyond the Pole, The Bridge of Light, The Man Who Could Vanish and A Voice From the Inner World, which uses the hollow Earth idea and a lost civilization within the planet. His fiction mixes his real travel experience with imaginative scientific speculation. He spent his later years in Florida.
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