Robert Oliver Cunningham was a Scottish naturalist. In January 1866 he was appointed Professor of Natural History in the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, but resigned in June in consequence of being appointed by the Admiralty upon the recommendation of Joseph Dalton Hooker, to collect plants as naturalist on board HMS Nassau. His natural history notes and narrative of the voyage was published in 1871 as The Natural History of the Straits of Magellan. In all, Cunningham published 18 scientific papers before 1872, his first which was about gannets was his theses but the others were mainly on his observations from the voyage of the Nassau. He presented some of these papers to the Zoological Society of London and to the Linnean Society. In 1871 Cunninham was appointed Professor of Natural History at Queens College, Belfast where he spent the following 31 years as a university teacher
Morton Allport was an English-born Australian colonial naturalist. His work added largely to the knowledge of the zoology and botany of Tasmania. He was an authority on Tasmanian fish and catalogued, described and drew pictures of his specimens. He was a leader in the introduction of salmon and trout to Tasmanian waters and also introduced the white water-lily and the perch. He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and of the Zoological Society of London. He was vice-president of the Royal Society of Tasmania
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
Gerald Malcom Durrell was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist and television presenter. He founded the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo in 1959. He wrote approximately forty books, mainly about his life as an animal collector and enthusiast, the most famous being My Family and Other Animals (1956). After the war. Durrell joined Whipsnade Zoo as a junior or student keeper
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 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
A French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the 'founding father of palaeontology'. Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and palaeontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils
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
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)
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