Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the debunked but influential recapitulation theory, falsely claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny, using incorrectly redrawn images of human embryonic development, images which heavily influenced the public to believe in the theory of evolution. Whether he intentionally falsified the images or drew them poorly by accident is a matter of debate.
Embryo drawing is the illustration of embryos in their developmental sequence. In plants and animals, an embryo develops from a zygote, the single cell that results when an egg and sperm fuse during fertilization. In animals, the zygote divides repeatedly to form a ball of cells, which then forms a set of tissue layers that migrate and fold to form an early embryo. Images of embryos provide a means of comparing embryos of different ages, and species. To this day, embryo drawings are made in undergraduate developmental biology lessons.
Jena is a city in Germany and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a population of about 110,000. Jena is a centre of education and research. The University of Jena was founded in 1558 and had 18,000 students in 2017 and the Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena serves another 5,000 students. Furthermore, there are many institutes of the leading German research societies.
Alfred Edmund Brehm was a German zoologist, writer, director of zoological gardens and the son of Christian Ludwig Brehm, a famous pastor and ornithologist. His multi-volume book Brehms Tierleben, which he co-authored with Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, Wilhelm Haacke, and Richard Schmidtlein, became a household word for popular zoological literature.
The University of Jena, officially the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, is a public research university located in Jena, Thuringia, Germany.
Erwin Friedrich Theodor Stresemann was a German naturalist and ornithologist. Stresemann was an ornithologist of extensive breadth who compiled one of the first and most comprehensive accounts of avian biology of its time as part of the Handbuch der Zoologie. In the process of his studies on birds, he also produced one of the most extensive historical accounts on the development of the science of ornithology. He influenced numerous ornithologists around him and oversaw the development of ornithology in Germany as editor of the Journal für Ornithologie. He also took an interest in poetry, philosophy and linguistics. He published a monograph on the Paulohi language based on studies made during his ornithological expedition to the Indonesian island.
Karl Hermann Johannes Thiele was a German zoologist specialized in malacology. Thiele was born in Goldap, East Prussia. His Handbuch der systematischen Weichtierkunde is a standard work. From 1904 until his retirement in 1925 he was the curator of the malacological collection at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Thiele described more than 1.500 new species of molluscs; until today their types are deposited with the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. Especially important are his works on the Mollusca of the First German Antarctica Expedition and of the German Deep Sea Expedition aboard the vessel Valdivia.
Felix Anton Dohrn FRS FRSE was a prominent German Darwinist and the founder and first director of the first marine-biological and zoological research station in the world, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy. The institution became a centre for the exchange of biological ideas through the network of visitors from around the world. He worked on embryology and examined vertebrate origins in terms of functional phylogeny and proposed a principle of succession of functions in 1875 on how one organ could become the basis for the evolution of another of an entirely different function. He was an elected International Member of the American Philosophical Society. The institution transitioned from a private one to a public Italian organization through the subsequent management by his son Reinhard Dohrn.
Oscar Hertwig was a German embryologist and zoologist known for his research in developmental biology and evolution. Hertwig is credited as the first person to observe sexual reproduction at the cellular level, by looking at the cells of sea urchins under the microscope.
Richard Wilhelm Karl Theodor Ritter von Hertwig, also Richard Hertwig or Richard von Hertwig, was a German zoologist and professor of 50 years, notable as the first to describe zygote formation as the fusing of spermatozoa inside the membrane of an egg cell during fertilization. Richard Hertwig was the younger brother of Oscar Hertwig, who also analyzed zygote formation.
Adolf Naef was a Swiss zoologist and palaeontologist who worked on cephalopods and systematics. Although he struggled with academic politics throughout his career and difficult conditions during World War I and II, his work had lasting influences on the fields of phylogenetics, morphology, and embryology.
The Zoological Garden of Hamburg was a zoo in Hamburg, Germany that operated from 1863 until 1930. Its aquarium, which opened in 1864, was among the first in the world.
Willy Georg Kükenthal was a German zoologist. He was the older brother of botanist and theologian Georg Kükenthal (1864–1955). Kükenthal specialized in the Octocorallia and on marine mammals. He edited, along with Thilo Krumbach, a landmark series of eight volumes in the Handbuch der Zoologie series which extensively reviewed and compiled the state of zoological knowledge of the time.
Johann Wilhelm Haacke was a German zoologist born in Clenze, which is now Lower Saxony, who served as Director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide from 1882 to 1884.
Ludwig Hermann Plate was a German zoologist and student of Ernst Haeckel. He wrote a "thorough and extensive defence" of Darwinism, but before Mendel's work had been assimilated in the modern synthesis.
Alexander Wilhelm Götte, best known as Alexander W. von Goette, was a German zoologist born in St. Petersburg. He is remembered for his studies involving the biological development of various animals. The invertebrate species Opisthocystis goettei is named after him.
Heinrich Schmidt was a German archivist, naturalist, philosopher, professor and a student of Ernst Haeckel.
Arnold Lang was a Swiss naturalist, a comparative anatomist and student of German biologist Ernst Haeckel.
John Dow Fisher Gilchrist (1866–1926) was a Scottish ichthyologist, who established ichthyology as a scientific discipline in South Africa. He was instrumental in the development of marine biology in South Africa and of a scientifically based local fishing industry.
Friedrich Ferdinand Christian Peus or Fritz Peus was a German entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera, Diptera and Siphonaptera. He was a specialist on the fleas.
