Biology – The natural science that studies life. Areas of focus include structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
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.
Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the past the term insect was less specific, and historically the definition of entomology would also include the study of animals in other arthropod groups, such as arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans. This wider meaning may still be encountered in informal use. The field is also referred to as insectology in American English, while in British English insectology implies the study of the relationships between insects and humans.
In zoology, mammalogy is the study of mammals – a class of vertebrates with characteristics such as homeothermic metabolism, fur, four-chambered hearts, and complex nervous systems. Mammalogy has also been known as "mastology", "theriology", and "therology". The archive of number of mammals on earth is constantly growing, but is currently set at 6,495 different mammal species including recently extinct. There are 5,416 living mammals identified on earth and roughly 1,251 have been newly discovered since 2006. The major branches of mammalogy include natural history, taxonomy and systematics, anatomy and physiology, ethology, ecology, and management and control. The approximate salary of a mammalogist varies from $20,000 to $60,000 a year, depending on their experience. Mammalogists are typically involved in activities such as conducting research, managing personnel, and writing proposals.
Vertebrate zoology is the biological discipline that consists of the study of Vertebrate animals, i.e., animals with a backbone, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Many natural history museums have departments named Vertebrate Zoology. In some cases whole museums bear this name, e.g. the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.
A zoological society is a group or organization, often a voluntary association, interested in fields of study related to the animal kingdom. These fields generally include zoology, animal physiology, pathology, veterinary medicine, wildlife conservation, conservation biology, and related topics. Zoological societies are often associated with the operation and/or management of zoos, public aquariums, veterinary hospitals, research institutions, and conservation projects, and with the publication of scientific journals and periodicals. The first such society was the Zoological Society of London, founded in 1826.
Karl Patterson Schmidt was an American herpetologist.
The Museum of Comparative Zoology is a zoology museum located on the grounds of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is one of three natural-history research museums at Harvard, whose public face is the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Harvard MCZ's collections consist of some 21 million specimens, of which several thousand are on rotating display at the public museum. In July 2021, Gonzalo Giribet, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, was announced as the new director of the museum.
CSIRO Publishing is an Australian-based science and technology publisher. It publishes books, journals and magazines across a range of scientific disciplines, including agriculture, chemistry, plant and animal sciences, natural history and environmental management. It also produces interactive learning modules for primary school students and provides writing workshops for researchers.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to zoology:
Acta Zoologica is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. It is one of the world's leading zoological journals and focuses on animal development, structure, and function, including physiological organization. It primarily publishes original research papers, but occasionally also publishes review articles.
This is a chronologically organized listing of notable zoological events and discoveries.
Philip Hershkovitz was an American mammalogist. Born in Pittsburgh, he attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Michigan and lived in South America collecting mammals. In 1947, he was appointed a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and he continued to work there until his death. He published much on the mammals of the Neotropics, particularly primates and rodents, and described almost 70 new species and subspecies of mammals. About a dozen species have been named after him.
This is a list of the fastest animals in the world, by types of animal.
Peter Brazaitis is an American herpetologist and forensic specialist in herpetology and worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society from 1954 to 1998. He began as a reptile keeper at the Bronx Zoo, became Senior Keeper in 1967, Assistant Animal Manager in 1970, and Superintendent of Reptiles in 1972. In 1988, he transferred to the Central Park Wildlife Center as Assistant Curator of Animals and became Curator of Animals in 1990, a position he held until his retirement in 1998.
Richard Lawrence Hoffman was an American zoologist known as an international expert on millipedes, and a leading authority on the natural history of Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains. He was a biology professor at Virginia's Radford College for almost thirty years, and curator of invertebrates at the Virginia Museum of Natural History for another twenty years. He co-founded the Virginia Natural History Society, described over 400 species of millipedes, and produced more than 480 scientific publications. He is commemorated in the scientific and/or common names of over 30 animal species, including the valley and ridge salamander and Hoffman's dwarf centipede.
William T. Stanley was an American mammalogist who was a manager of the collections at one of the world's largest natural history museums and a student of the mammals of eastern Africa. He was an evolutionary biologist and mammalogist, and at the time of his death was the director of the Field Museum of Natural History's Collections Center and the Collection Manager of the Field Museum's Collection of Mammals. Stanley studied the biogeography, ecology, evolution, and systematics of shrews, bats and rodents that live on mountains within Tanzania and surrounding countries.
Józef Razowski is a Polish entomologist and lepidopterist specializing in Tortricidae. He is an honorary member of the Polish Entomological Society and a working member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU). From 1988 to 1997, Razowski headed the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals.
Darrel Richmond Frost is an American herpetologist and systematist. He was previously head curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as president of both the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (1998) and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (2006). Four taxa are named in his honor: the toad genus Frostius, the tree frog Dendropsophus frosti, Darrel's Chorus Frog Microhyla darreli, and Frost's arboreal alligator lizard Abronia frosti.
The Wells and Wellington affair was a dispute about the publication of three papers in the Australian Journal of Herpetology in 1983 and 1985. The periodical was established in 1981 as a peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on the study of amphibians and reptiles (herpetology). Its first two issues were published under the editorship of Richard W. Wells, a first-year biology student at Australia's University of New England. Wells then ceased communicating with the journal's editorial board for two years before suddenly publishing three papers without peer review in the journal in 1983 and 1985. Coauthored by himself and high school teacher Cliff Ross Wellington, the papers reorganized the taxonomy of all of Australia's and New Zealand's amphibians and reptiles and proposed over 700 changes to the binomial nomenclature of the region's herpetofauna.