Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton discovered on November 30, 1974 by the International Afar Research Expedition (IARE; director: Maurice Taieb, co-directors: Donald Johanson and Yves C...

In the year 1598 AD, Portuguese sailors landing on the shores of the island of Mauritius discovered a previously unknown species of bird, the Dodo. Having been isolated by its island location from contact with humanity, the dodo greeted the...

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Berlin Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the...

Jean-Baptiste de la Marck, often just known as "Lamarck", was a French soldier, naturalist, academic and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. In the modern era, Lamarck is re...

Franz Josef Gall was a German neuroanatomist, physiologist and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain. Claimed as the founder of phrenology, Gall was an early and important researcher in his fields. His...

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific vie...

Samuel George Morton was an American physician and natural scientist. Samuel George Morton is often thought of as the originator of "American School" ethnography, a school of thought in antebellum American science that claimed the differenc...

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution o...

Edward Blyth was an English zoologist and pharmacist. He was one of the founders of zoology in India. Blyth was born in London in 1810. In 1841 he travelled to India to become the curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal...

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, prominent classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the phy...

Gregor Johann Mendel was a Austrian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were...

Sir Francis Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted i...

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly publi...

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. Wall...

Thomas Henry Huxley was one of the first adherents to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and did more than anyone else to advance its acceptance among scientists and the public alike. As is evident from the letter quoted abo...