Showing 37 results

Authority record
Naturalist
Peters, Wilhelm Karl Hartwig
Peters, Wilhelm Karl Hartwig
Person · 1815-1883

Wilhelm Karl Hartwich (or Hartwig) Peters was a German naturalist and explorer. He was assistant to the anatomist Johannes Peter Müller and later became curator of the Berlin Zoological Museum. Encouraged by Müller and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Peters travelled to Mozambique via Angola in September 1842, exploring the coastal region and the Zambesi River. He returned to Berlin with an enormous collection of natural history specimens, which he then described in Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique... in den Jahren 1842 bis 1848 ausgeführt (1852–1882). He replaced Martin Lichtenstein as curator of the museum in 1858, and in the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In a few years, he greatly increased the Berlin Museum's herpetological collection to a size comparable to those of Paris and London. Herpetology was Peters' main interest, and he described 122 new genera and 649 species from around the world
Owen, Richard, Sir
Owen, Richard, Sir
Person · 1804-1892

Sir Richard Owen was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist. Owen produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered for coining the word Dinosauria, meaning terrible reptile or fearfully great reptile. An outspoken critic of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Owen agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred, but thought it was more complex than outlined in Darwin's On the Origin of the Species. Owen was the first President of the Microscopical Society of London in 1839 and edited many issues of its journal, The Microscopic Journal. Owen also campaigned for the natural specimens in the British Museum to be given a new home. This resulted in the establishment, in 1881, of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.
Neave, Sheffield Airey
Person · 1879-1961

Neave was a British naturalist and entomologist. He was the grandson of Sheffield Neave, a governor of the Bank of England and the father of Airey Neave. He was born in Kensworth, Hertfordshire, the son of Sheffield Henry M. Neave and his wife Gertrude Charlotte Margaret (nee Airey). He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford.

Neave's first work was research into the problems related to the tsetse fly and the study of African animal life. He was part of the Geodetic Survey of Northern Rhodesia between 1904 and 1905. Between 1906 and 1908 he was part of the Katanga Sleeping Sickness Commission and then from 1909 to 1913 the Entomological Research Committee of Tropical Africa.

He returned to the United Kingdom in 1913 and was appointed Assistant Director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, becoming Director from 1942-1946. He was appointed as an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1933 and a companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1941. From 1918 until 1933 he was Honorary Secretary of the Royal Entomological Society and was then its President in 1934-1935.

In 1934 he had the idea to compile an updated index of all published generic and subgeneric names in zoology, an activity which occupied the period 1935-1939, and resulted in the publication of his (initially) four volume 'Nomenclator Zoologicus' in 1939-1940. He also oversaw the preparation of a fifth volume, published in 1950.

Neave was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1942. He retired in 1946 but carried on as Honorary Secretary until 1952.

Naeve married twice, firstly to Dorothy Middleton and they had two sons and three daughters, the eldest was Airey Neave, later a Member of Parliament. Dorothy died in 1942 and Neave married a second time to Mary Hodges in London in 1946.
Murray, Andrew
Person · 1812-1878

Andrew Dickson Murrary was a Scottish lawyer, botanist, zoologist and entomologist. Murray studied insects which caused crop damage, specialising in coleoptera. In botany, he specialised in Coniferae. He served as president of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh during 1858-59. Murray was a prominent opponent of the Darwin-Wallace model of natural selection. Murray believed that hybridisation was a better explanation for mimicry than natural selection. In 1860, Murray reviewed Darwin's On the Origin of Species in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Marshall, George Frederick Leycester
Person · 1843-1934

Major-General George Frederick Leycester Marshall became a Colonel in the Indian Army and was a naturalist interested in the birds and butterflies of India. Marshall described several new species of butterflies, along with Lionel de Nicéville, and discovered the white-tailed iora, sometimes referred to as Marshall's ilora. He wrote The Butterflies of India, Burmah and Ceylon
Lockley, Ronald Mathias
Lockley, Ronald Mathias
Person · 1903-2000

Ronald Mathias Lockley was a Welsh ornithologist and naturalist. He wrote over 50 books on natural history, including a major study of shearwaters. He is perhaps best known for his book The Private Life of the Rabbit
Lee, Henry
Person · 1826-1888

Henry Lee was an English naturalist. He succeeded John Keast Lord as naturalist of the Brighton Aquarium in 1872, and was for a time a director. At the aquarium he instituted experiments on the migration of smelts, the habits of the herring, whitebait, crayfish, and other topics. Lee was an amateur collector of natural history specimens and microscopist. He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Geological Society and Zoological Society of London. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1875-1877. Lee was sceptical of the claims of cryptozoology and sea serpents. His book Sea Monsters Unmasked (1884) compared sightings of the Kraken to the squid
Knight, Maxwell
Person · 1887-1968

Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was a British spymaster, naturalist and broadcaster, reputedly a model for the James Bond character 'M'. He played major roles in surveillance of an early British Fascist party as well as the main Communist Party. He penned numerous books about natural history and animals. After his death, the Maxwell Knight Memorial Fund was set up, which provided for the Maxwell Knight Young Naturalists' Library in the education centre of the Natural History Museum. After Knight's death, a wildlife memorial fund was established in his name, headed by David Attenborough and Peter Scott
Jackson, Frederick John
Jackson, Frederick John
Person · 1860-1929

Sir Frederick John Jackson was an English administrator, explorer and ornithologist. Jackson joined the British Ornithologists' Union in 1888. That year a paper by Jackson and Captain Shelley was published describing birds collected during his 1884-1886 trip to Africa. He collected many specimens in an 1898-1891 expedition to Uganda, and descriptions of this collection were published in a five-part paper in the Ibis in 1891-1892. Other papers described new species appeared in the Ibis and other journals between 1890 and 1917. Jackson was elected President of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society in 1910. He wrote nine of the nineteen chapters of Big Game Shooting, published in 1894. After retiring he worked on a complete history of the Birds of East Africa and Uganda, which was unpublished when he died in 1929, following pneumonia. The Birds of Kenya Colony and the Uganda Protectorate was completed by William Lutley Sclater
Hudson, William Henry
Hudson, William Henry
Person · 1841-1922

William Henry Hudson (known in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson) was an Anglo-Argentine author, naturalist and ornithologist. Hudson spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna in Argentina while publishing his ornithological work in the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1899) and British Birds (1895)