William Ruxton Davison was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 ornithologist and collector.

Davison was the curator of the Raffles Museum in Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

 from 1887 to 1893. Prior to this Davison worked as a collector for Allan Octavian Hume

Allan Octavian Hume

Allan Octavian Hume was a civil servant, political reformer and amateur ornithologist in British India. He was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, a political party that was later to lead the Indian independence movement...

. He travelled on behalf of Hume in Tenasserim in the 1870s and collected 8,600 specimens. The results of this were published in a joint article by Davison and Hume, A Revised List of the Birds of Tenasserim (1878). He was considered to be one of the best field naturalists of his time.

Davison is commemorated in the name of the White-shouldered Ibis Pseudibis davisoni and in a subspecies of the Javanese Flying Squirrel

Javanese Flying Squirrel

The Javanese Flying Squirrel is a species of rodent in the Sciuridae family. It is found in Indonesia and Malaysia....

.