Showing 37 results

Authority record
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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Salvin, Osbert
Person · 1835-1898

Osbert Salvin was an English naturalist, ornithologist and herpetologist, best known for co-authoring Biologia Centrali-Americana (1879-1915) with Frederick DuCane Godman. In 1871 Salvin became editor of The Ibis. He was appointed to the Strickland Curatorship in the University of Cambridge, and produced his Catalogue of the Strickland Collection. He was one of the original members of the British Ornithologists' Union. He produced the volumes on the Trochilidae and Procellariidae in the Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum. One of his last works was the completion of Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of British Birds (1897). Salvin was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Linnean, Entomogical and Zoological Society of London. At the time of his death he was Secretary of the British Ornithologists' Union.

Person · 1812-1884

George Brettingham Sowerby II was a British naturalist, illustrator and conchologist. Together with his father, George Brettingham Sowerby I, he published the Thesaurus Conchyliorum and other illustrated works on molluscs. He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society on 7th May 1844. He was the father of George Brettingham Sowerby III, also a malacologist

St Quintin, William Herbert
Person · 1851-1933

William Herbert St Quintin was a British naturalist. He was a keen ornithologist, keeping a private collection of birds including Great bustards, a secretary bird and a tui. He was a founding member of the Avicultural Society in 1895, president of the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union in 1909, a member of the British Ornithologists' Union from 1883 to 1922 and also served on the council of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds from 1908-1919