In science, controversies often arise over complex issues when researchers approach a problem from different points of view, backgrounds, and philosophies—think, for example, of the debates over nature vs nurture, selection vs drift, group vs kin vs individual selection, gradualism vs punctuated equilibria, and mechanisms of sexual selection. As Ledyard Stebbins pointed out in 1982, …
Last Wednesday, 29 November, was the 390th anniversary of the birth of John Wray, exactly one week later than the birthday of his student, friend, collaborator, and benefactor Francis Willughby (on 22 November) who was 7 years younger. Wray changed his surname to Ray when he was 43 years old having decided then that that …
When I was a young teenager I spent my Saturday mornings during the school year at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). I was there to attend the weekly meeting of the Toronto Junior Field Naturalists’ Club, but often stayed afterward to explore the public galleries. I particularly loved the dioramas of birds and mammals as …
Johann Friederich Naumann (1780-1857) is probably the best known of the early German ornithologists, and was one of the founders of scientific ornithology in continental Europe. Naumann collected birds and their eggs, illustrated them, and wrote extensively about them — all while running the family farm and rearing his own brood of nine children. Naumann’s …
Yesterday (12 November) marked the anniversary of the discovery, in 1912, of the remains of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. The story of that expedition’s side-trip to collect Emperor Penguin eggs is well-known, celebrated in myriad books, articles, documentary films and exhibitions. As is often the case with scientific …
Where did the English names for birds come from (and where are they going)? I discussed a few weeks ago some of the onomatopoeic bird names (cuckoo, for example), but many of the common bird names currently in use derived from other sources indicating some aspect of the bird’s appearance, place of discovery, or habits …
Guest Post Karl Schulze-Hagen, Mönchengladbach, Germany The very first paper published in the Journal für Ornithologie, in 1853, was written by the Dresden zoologist Ludwig Reichenbach (1793-1879). That paper {On the concept of species in ornithology} [see footnote 1] is a bit long-winded and difficult to comprehend by today’s standards, but it is historically important …
While preparing a talk [1] last week about the early history of ornithology in North America, I wondered who might have been the first to describe and identify a bird on this continent. As far as I can tell, that was Jacques Cartier when he wrote, in 1534, about the ‘Apponat‘ (originally in French but …
Francis Willughby (1635-1672), an English ornithologist, is far from well-known. He died at just 36, so his groundbreaking books on birds, fish and insects were all completed and subsequently published by his life-long friend and one-time undergraduate tutor, John Ray. A brilliant academic and prolific writer, Ray rather eclipsed Francis Willughby. When I wrote The …
Just a week ago the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft (DO-G; German Ornithologists’ Society) celebrated its 150th anniversary at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Halle (Saale) near Leipzig, Germany. The DO-G was actually founded in Leipzig by three men—Johann Friedrich Naumann, August Carl Eduard Baldamus and Eugen Ferdinand von Homeyer—in 1850, so the reason for their 150th anniversary …