John Samuel Budgett was a British zoologist and embryologist. He spent most of his short career on the genus Polypterus (bichir), found in the lakes, river margins, swamps and floodplains of tropical central and western African and the Nile River system. He died to blackwater fever shortly after his return to England. This happened on the very day that he was suppose to deliver a lecture of his work to the Zoological Society of London. He didn't have time to write a report, but he did leave a full set of drawings and specimens. It was left to his friend and colleague John Graham Kerr to interpret them and write the report
Octavius Pickard-Cambridge was an English clergyman and zoologist. His main interest was in spiders, though he wrote also on birds and lepidoptera. He published extensively on spiders between 1859 and his death in 1917, including in the the journal of the Zoological Society of London. He became a world authority of spiders, describing a considerable number of new species including the Costa Rican redleg tarantula and the Sydney funnel-web spider
George Soper Cansdale was born in Brentwood, Essex and attended Brentwood School before studying for a degree in forestry at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He then joined the Colonial Service, and in 1934 was appointed as Forestry Officer for the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where he started collecting animals for a friend who worked at Paignton Zoo. He used local children to help him collect specimens, and as a result discovered several new species. He began supplying animals for several zoos, including London Zoo.
In 1947 he was recruited by the Zoological Society of London as their Superintendent, a post which he held until 1953. During that period he began to broadcast for the BBC, on early wildlife programmes such as 'Heads, Tails and Feet', 'Looking at Animals' and 'All About Animals', the latter two of which won the Royal Television Society's silver medal in 1952. He also made regular appearances on Children's Hour on BBC radio. From the 1960s onwards he was a regular guest on Blue Peter.
In the 1960s Cansdale became Director of Marine Land in Morecambe, Chessington Zoo and Natureland in Skegness. He also developed, with his son, a method of obtaining clean seawater by filtering it through beach sand, and set up a company, SWF Filtration Ltd, which won the international IBM Award for Sustainable Development in 1990.
His books included 'Animals in West Africa' (1946), 'Animals and Man' (1952), 'George Cansdale's Zoo Book' (1953), 'Belinda and the Bushbaby' (written with his wife, 1953), 'Reptiles of West Africa' (1955), 'The Ladybird Book of British Wild Animals' (1958), 'West African Snakes' (1961), 'Behind the Scenes at a Zoo (1965) and 'Animals of Bible Lands' (1965).
Paul Belloni Du Chaillu was a French-American traveller, zoologist and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European to confirm the existence of gorillas
A French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the 'founding father of palaeontology'. Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and palaeontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils
Felix Anton Dohrn was a prominent German Darwinist and the founder and first director of the first zoological research station in the world, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy.
Alphonse Milne-Edwards was a French mammalogist, ornithologist and carcinologist. He was the son of Henri Milne-Edwards. Milne-Edwards obtained a medical degree in 1859 and became assistant to his father at the Jardin des Plantes in 1876. He became the director of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1891, devoting himself especially to fossil birds and deep-sea exploration. In 1881 he undertook a survey of the Gulf of Gascony with Léopold de Folin and worked aboard the Travailleur and the Talisman on trips to the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores. For this, he received a gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg was a German naturalist, zoologist, comparative anatomist, geologist and microscopist.
Daniel Giraud Elliot was an American zoologist. He used his wealth to publish a series of colour-plate books on birds and animals. Elliot wrote the text himself and commissioned artists such as Joseph Wolf and Joseph Smit, both of whom had worked for John Gould, to provide the illustrations. The books included A Monograph of the Phasianidae (Family of the Pheasants) (1870–72), A Monograph of the Paradiseidae or Birds of Paradise (1873),[3] A Monograph of the Felidae or Family of Cats (1878) and Review of the Primates (1913). In 1899 he was invited to join the Harriman Alaska Expedition to study and document wildlife along the Alaskan coast. Elliot was one of the founders of the American Museum on Natural History in New York City, of the American Ornithologists' Union and of the Société zoologique de France. He was also curator of zoology at the Field Museum in Chicago
James Cossar Ewart was a Scottish zoologist. He performed breeding experiments with horses and zebras which disproved earlier theories of heredity. He studied medicine from 1871 to 1874 at the University of Medicine. After graduation, he became an anatomy demonstrator under William Turner and then held the position of Curator of the Zoological Museum at University College, London, where he assisted Ray Lankester (later director of the Natural History Museum) by making zoological preparations for the museum and providing teaching support for Lankester's course in practical zoology. In 1878 he returned to Scotland to take a post of Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen from where he moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1882, staying in the post until 1927.