Naturalists: The Originators of the Natural Sciences
Carl Linneaus (Carl von Linné)
1707-1778. Linneaus was the creator of the scientific standard of the naming system of all natural things. He is called the “father of modern taxonomy.” When you see an “L” next to a species name, you’ll know Linneaus named it.
Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck
1744-1829. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck was a French nobleman and naturalist. He was the first to formulate the evolutionary process of species adaptation to “quick” changes in the environmental conditions, proven with the advent of the ability to read and analyze genetic processes.
William Smith
1769-1839. “The Father of English Geology,” Smith was a milling and canal engineer and discovered fossils while digging for coal and digging canal trenches for navigation. He was the first to begin to understand the relationship between the fossils he discovered and the age of the geologic layers according to their depth: the deeper the fossils were found, the farther back in time they lived.
Hugh Cuming
1791-1865. Cuming traveled extensively collecting thousands of specimens, many of which were bought by the National History Museum in London after his death.
In 1827, Cuming commissioned the first ship built and dedicated to scientific exploration and discovery. He collected the largest number and variety of seashell species during his lifetime and to the present day.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power
1794-1871, first to study living aquatic life (paper nautilus octopus) under controlled conditions inside aquarium tanks built for that purpose.
Mary Anning
1799-1847. Fossil collector and paleontologist, best known for the first complete Plesiosaurus ever found. She began to bring to the world the extent of the type of animals that occupied the ancient oceans.
Charles Darwin
1809-1882. Darwin was a naturalist and the first to fully form and describe the process of “natural selection” in 1859 in “On the Origin of the Species.” This is the evolution of a species becoming another distinct form by adaptation to survive under new conditions.
Jules Verne
1828-1905. Jules Verne explored the ocean’s life and treasures for public consumption with “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.” He was also the author of “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Around the World in Eighty Days.”
Jacques Cousteau
1910-1997. Pioneer in marine conservation and ocean exploration, inventor of diving equipment — the Aqua-Lung Rebreather — and underwater filming equipment and techniques. Cousteau brought the Calypso’s discoveries to TV in “The Under Sea World of Jacques Cousteau.”
