Zoology is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the structure, embryology, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems. Zoology is one of the primary branches of biology. The term is derived from Ancient Greek ζῷον, zōion ('animal'), and λόγος, logos.
Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved.
Frank Rattray Lillie was an American zoologist and an early pioneer of the study of embryology. Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Lillie moved to the United States in 1891 to study for a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Lillie formed a lifelong association with the laboratory, eventually rising to become its director in 1908. His efforts developed the MBL into a full-time institution.
Alexander Onufrievich Kovalevsky was a Russian embryologist, who studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and became professor at the University of St Petersburg. He was the brother of the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, and the brother-in-law of the mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya.
Walter Jakob Gehring was a Swiss developmental biologist who was a professor at the Biozentrum Basel of the University of Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Ernst Hadorn he joined Alan Garen's group at Yale University in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow.
Patricia "Pat" Simpson FRS is a distinguished British developmental biologist. Simpson was a professor of Comparative Biology at the University of Cambridge from 2003 to 2010, and was the University's Director of Research for the academic year 2010/2011. She is currently an Emeritus Professor of the Department of Zoology of the University of Cambridge, having previously been Professor of Comparative Embryology, and a Fellow of Newnham College. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000.
The Spiralia are a morphologically diverse clade of protostome animals, including within their number the molluscs, annelids, platyhelminths and other taxa. The term Spiralia is applied to those phyla that exhibit canonical spiral cleavage, a pattern of early development found in most members of the Lophotrochozoa.
Denis Duboule is a Swiss-French biologist. He earned his PhD in Biology in 1984 and is currently Professor of Developmental Genetics and Genomics at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and at the Department of Genetics and Evolution of the University of Geneva. Since 2001, he is the Director of the Swiss National Research Center "Frontiers in Genetics" and since 2017, he is also a professor at the Collège de France. He has notably worked on Hox genes, a group of genes involved in the formation of the body plan and of the limbs.
Donald Thomas Anderson is an English zoologist, lecturer at King's College London, and Challis Professor of Biology at University of Sydney. He is currently based in Australia.
Brian Keith Hall is the George S. Campbell Professor of Biology and University Research Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hall has researched and extensively written on bone and cartilage formation in developing vertebrate embryos. He is an active participant in the evolutionary developmental biology (EVO-DEVO) debate on the nature and mechanisms of animal body plan formation. Hall has proposed that the neural crest tissue of vertebrates may be viewed as a fourth embryonic germ layer. As such, the neural crest - in Hall's view - plays a role equivalent to that of the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm of bilaterian development and is a definitive feature of vertebrates. As such, vertebrates are the only quadroblastic, rather than triploblastic bilaterian animals. In vertebrates the neural crest serves to integrate the somatic division and visceral division together via a wide range novel vertebrate tissues.
Rudolf Albert Raff was an American biologist, and James H. Rudy Professor of Biology at Indiana University. He was known for research in, and promotion of, evolutionary developmental biology. He was also director of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute.
John Wilfred Jenkinson (1871–1915) was a pioneer in the field of comparative developmental biology and one of the first to introduce experimental embryology to the UK at the start of the 20th century. He originally studied Classics as an undergraduate student at Oxford, before switching his attention to Zoology under the guidance of W. F. R. Weldon at University College London. He also travelled to Utrecht University in the Netherlands, to work with Ambrosius Hubrecht, and was exposed to new methods and approaches in embryology. In 1905, he was appointed the first lecturer in Embryology at the University of Oxford in England, and in 1909 published the first English textbook on experimental embryology in which he summarized recent work in the emerging scientific discipline and criticized neo-vitalist theories of Hans Driesch.
Athula H. Wikramanayake is a Sri Lankan American developmental biologist and Professor at the University of Miami.
William R. Jeffery is an American professor of evolutionary developmental biology whose studies focus on the evolution of development, especially blind cavefish and tunicates. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Linnean Society of London.
Scott Frederick Gilbert is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and historian of biology.
In Embryology a phylotypic stage or phylotypic period is a particular developmental stage or developmental period during mid-embryogenesis where embryos of related species within a phylum express the highest degree of morphological and molecular resemblance. Recent molecular studies in various plant and animal species were able to quantify the expression of genes covering crucial stages of embryo development and found that during the morphologically defined phylotypic period the evolutionary oldest genes, genes with similar temporal expression patterns, and genes under strongest purifying selection are most active throughout the phylotypic period.
Mary Esther Rice was an American invertebrate zoologist specializing in systematics, evolution and the development of marine invertebrates. She worked at the Smithsonian Institution as a curator, educator, research advisor, and administrator from 1966 until her retirement in 2002. She is known for her work on the life histories of Sipuncula, as well as for serving as the first director of the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce.
Herman Frederik Nijhout is a Dutch-born American evolutionary biologist and the John Franklin Crowell Professor of Biology at Duke University. His research is focused on evolutionary developmental biology and entomology, with a particular focus on the hormonal control of growth, molting and metamorphosis in insects, including the mechanisms that control the development of alternative phenotypes. Much of his work has also been concerned with understanding the development and evolution of the wing patterns of butterflies. He received the ESA Founders' Memorial Award from the Entomological Society of America in 2006. In 2015, he was awarded the A.O. Kowalevsky Medal, and in 2018, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Billie J. Swalla is a professor of biology at the University of Washington. She was the first female director of Friday Harbor Laboratories, where she worked from 2012 to 2019. Her lab investigates the evolution of chordates by comparative genetic and phylogenetic analysis of animal taxa.
Piotr Pavlovich Ivanov was a Soviet embryologist and a professor. He studied segmentation in annelids and arthropods and proposed the differentiation of two kinds of segments in segmented organisms and the developmental idea of heteronomous metamery where several segments fuse to perform a common function.
