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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.

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

Sir Samuel White Baker was and English explorer, officer, naturalist, big game hunter, engineer, writer and abolitionist. He also held the titles of Pasha and Major-General in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt

Henry Walter Bates was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the rainforests of the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace, starting in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection on the return voyage when his ship caught fire. When Bates arrived home in 1859, he had sent back over 14,712 species (mostly insects) of which 8,000 were (according to Bates) new to science. Bates wrote up his findings in the work The Naturalist on the River Amazons

William Spiers Bruce was a British naturalist, polar scientist and oceanographer who organised and led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition to the South Orkney Islands and the Weddell Sea

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

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and botanist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's conception of gradual geological change, and the publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil