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Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby was a politician, peer, landowner, builder, farmer, art collector and naturalist. He was the patron of the writer Edward Lear.

In 1834 he succeeded his father as 13th Earl of Derby and withdrew from politics, instead concentrating on his natural history collection at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. He had a large collection of living animals; at his death there were 1,272 birds and 345 mammals at Knowsley, shipped to England by explorers such as Joseph Burke. From 1828 to 1833 he was President of the Linnean Society. Several species were named after him. He was President of the Zoological Society 1831-1851.

William Bernhardt Tegetmeier was an English naturalist, a founding member of the Savage Club, a popular writer and journalist of domestic science. A correspondent and friend of Charles Darwin, Tegetmeier studied pigeon breeds and the optimality of hexagonal honeycomb cells constructed by honeybees. He wrote a number of books dealing with home economics, poultry farming, pigeon breeds, bee-keeping and on the maintenance of livestock

Jules Pierre Verreaux was a French botanist and ornithologist, and a professional collector and trader in natural history specimens. Verreaux worked for the family business, Maison Verreaux, established in 1803 by his father, Jacques Philippe Verreaux, which was the earliest known company that dealt in objects of natural history. The company funded collection expeditions to various parts of the world

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin the publish On the Origin of Species.

George Robert Waterhouse was an English naturalist. He became interested in entomology though his father (an amateur entomologist) and he founded the Entomological Society of London along with Frederick William Hope in 1833 with himself as honorary curator. He became its president in 1849-50. The Royal Institution at Liverpool appointed him curator of its museum in 1835 and he exchanged this in 1836 for a position at the Zoological Society of London. His early work was on cataloguing the mammals at the museum and although he completed the work the next year, it was not published as he had not followed the quinary system of that time. He was invited to join Charles Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle but he declined it. On Darwin's return, the collection of mammals and beetles was entrusted to him. In November 1843 he became an assistant in the mineralogical department of the British Museum of Natural History. He became keeper in 1851 and held the position until his retirement in 1880. He was the author of A Natural History of the Mammalia (1846-48). He assisted Louis Agassiz with his Nomenclator Zoologicus.