Alfred Henry Garrod was born in London in 1846. He was the eldest child of Sir Alfred Barring Garrod, an eminent physician of the time. He studied medicine at Kings College London and was elected to St John's College, Cambridge in 1870. He started work as the prosector/anatomist at ZSL in 1871 and held this position until his death in 1879. He was especially interested in the anatomy of birds.
Abraham Dee Bartlett was the second son of John Bartlett and Jane Dunster. He was interested in animals as a child and his father's friend was Edward Cross, owner of the menagerie Exeter Exchange. He had a taxidermy business near the British Museum. Dead birds were sent to him for taxidermic preservation, and for his exhibits he received a gold medal at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He was among the first to reconstruct a specimen of the dodo, and this was displayed at Sydenham Crystal Palace, where he was appointed naturalist in 1852.
He associated himself with the Zoological Society of London and was offered the position of superintendent made vacant by the death of John Thompson at the garden in Regents Park in 1859. He was an agent for the acquisition of wild animals and was involved in their sale to circus agents. In 1882 he became unpopular after deciding to sell the African elephant Jumbo to P T Barnum. He became an authority on the care of wild animals and published papers in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London and other journals. He received a silver medal by the Society in 1872 and was made an associate of the Linnean Society in 1879.
Bartlett died in the zoo premises in 1897 after suffering from an illness. His son, Clarence, who had been assistant superintendent at the Zoo, took his position as superintendent. Another son, Edward, became a taxidermist and curator at the Maidstone Museum and the Raja Brooke's Museum. Several writings of Bartlett were published after his death in two books, 'Wild Animals in Captivity' (1898) and 'Life among Wild Beasts in the Zoo' (1900).
Pocock was born in Clifton, Bristol, the fourth son of Rev. Nicholas Pocock and Edith Prichard. He began showing interest in natural history at St Edward's School, Oxford. He received tutoring in zoology from Sir Edward Poulton, and was allowed to explore comparative anatomy at the Oxford Museum. He studies biology and geology at University College, Bristol. In 1885 he became an assistant at the Natural History Museum, and worked in the section of entomology for a year. He was put in charge of the collections of arachnida and myriapoda. He was also given the task to arrange the British bird collections, in the course of which he developed as lasting interest in ornithology. The 200 papers he published in his 18 years at the museum brought him recognition as an authority on arachnida and myriapoda; he described between 300 and 400 species of millipedes alone, and also described the scorpion genus Brachistosternus.
In 1904, he left to become Superintendent of London Zoo, remaining so until his retirement in 1923. He then worked as a voluntary researcher in the British Museum, in the mammals department.
He described the leopon in a 1912 to 'The Field', based on examination of a skin sent to him by W S Millard, the secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society.
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).
Bennett was an English Zoologist and writer. He was the elder brother of the botanist John Joseph Bennett. He was born at Hackney and practiced as a surgeon, but his chief pursuit was always zoology. In 1822 he attempted to establish an entomological society, which later became a zoological society in connection with the Linnean Society. This in turn became the starting point of the Zoological Society of London, of which Bennett was Secretary from 1831-1836.
His works included 'The Tower Menagerie' (1829) and 'The Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society (1831). He also wrote, in conjunction with G. T. Lay, the section of Fishes in the 'Zoology of Beechey's Voyage' (1839). In 1835 he described a new species of African crocodile, Mecistops leptorhynchus, the validity of which was confirmed in 2018.
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg was a German naturalist, zoologist, comparative anatomist, geologist and microscopist.
Edward Blyth was an English zoologist who worked for most of his life in India as a curator of zoology at the museum of the Asiatic Society of India in Calcutta. In 1841 he travelled to India to become the curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. He set about updating the museum's catalogues, publishing a Catalogue of the Birds of the Asiatic Society in 1849. He remained as curator until 1862, when ill-health forced his return to England. His Natural History of the Cranes was published posthumously in 1881. Avian species bearing his name include Blyth's hornbill, Blyth's leaf warbler, Blyth's hawk-eagle, Blyth's olive bulbul, Blyth's parakeet, Blyth's frogmouth, Blyth's reed warbler, Blyth's rosefinch, Blyth's shrike-babbler, Blyth's tragopan, Blyth's pipit and Blyth's kingfisher. Reptilian species and a genus bearing his name include Blythia reticulata, Eumeces blythianus, and Rhinophis blythii
John Edward Gray was a British zoologist. He was the elder brother of zoologist George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray. Gray was keeper of zoology at the British Museum from 1840 until 1874, before the natural history holdings were split off to the Natural History Museum. He published several catalogues of the museum collections that included discussions of animal groups and descriptions of new species
Alfred Newton was an English zoologist and ornithologist. Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University from 1866 to 1907. Among his numerous publications were a four-volume Dictionary of Birds (1893-6), entries on ornithology in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition) while also an editor of the journal Ibis from 1865 to 1870. In 1900 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society. He founded the British Ornithologists Union
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz, son of Louis Agassiz and stepson of Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, was an American scientist and engineer.