Ad perpetuam memoriam (see also AnimalBase for old literature)
To the left is a photograph of a living specimen of the very rare deep-living sea-star Porania (Pseudoporania) stormi (Dons, 1936) (Photographer: Anders Axelsson). You may find a few biographical notes about Storm, as well as Dons and several other taxonomists or other persons from the etymologies of marine organisms in BEMON.
Contents declaration: The biographies are most often very short, including at least (if known to me) full name, year of birth, year of decease (if applicable) and nationality. By a "taxonomist" is meant anyone, who has described one or more scientific name of organisms. "Presumed Friends" are persons occuring with their names in scientific names of organisms. The word Etymology has its roots from two Greek words etymon = truth and logos = word. Already in "Naturalis historia" by Gaius Plinius Secundus (q.v.) one may find etymological explanations about organism names, but in this list only names honouring persons, expeditions and similar things, i.e. eponyms (from Greek epi = on + Greek onoma or onyma = name), may be found.
The elements of this list were originally cut from a rather thick
teaching aid compendium (or perhaps rather book - Hansson, H.G. 1998.
Sydskandinaviska marina flercelliga evertebrater. utgåva 2. Länsstyrelsen, Västra Götaland, Miljöavdelningen 1998: 4. 294 + ix pp.), dealing with marine invertebrates from south Scandinavia - written in Swedish. When compiling this book, I tried as much as possible to explain the etymology of taxon names involved and for persons involved in such names micro-biographies were included. A somewhat later version of this work in around 320 pages + several index pages, although still in Swedish, is available as a pdf file here. and its small bibliography - 10 pages - list (also pdf) is here.
The collection of biographies below is simply sampled from this book
by cutting and pasting, followed by a fast English translation.
However, rather many extra zoologists and several phycologists have
later been added. Sometimes, but not consistently, examples of taxa
connected with the name of a certain person are given within
brackets. English is not my native language, so you have to excuse
linguistical (and idiolectical) peculiarities. Only etymologies
involving non-mythological persons, i.e. biographies of
flesh-and-blood persons, are included here. Because of the sampling
method, the list is certainly biased. You will find a comparatively
large amount of persons from Europe, especially Scandinavia, Britain
and Germany, but rather few from other parts of the world, albeit the
bias is probably less now, compared to the initial phase of the web
version.
The data have originally been collected from several sources. It is
very easy to find encyclopedial data regarding a Linnaeus,
a Darwin or even a
Bowerbank, but if you
are looking for e.g. Edward Waller,
Augusta Ärnbäck-Christie-Linde,
George Crawford Hyndman
or the Pembrokshire naturalist John Adams
you may need to try other ways, sometimes in vain. Some articles in
journals and books are useful (e.g. see the selected references
below). Of course obituaries and articles in biographical lexica have
been very useful when found.
Some friends have provided a certain amount of information, e.g.
Anders Warén,
Stockholm, Riccardo Giannuzzi-Savelli,
Palermo and Christoffer Schander,
Göteborg about malacologists, Ole Tendal
(and presumably Torben Wolff),
Copenhagen about certain Danish biologists, Torleiv Brattegard,
Bergen about some Norwegian scientists, Kristian Fauchald,
Washington D.C. about some polychaetologists and his coworker Linda
Ward about her distant relative Webster and some other American
researchers. Kostya Khalturin, St. Petersburg helped with information
about some Russian workers. During the last days of 1998 Dr. David
Damkaer, found this
list by chance and has been of invaluable help in correcting several
mistakes and filling certain gaps. Thanks to the kind eagerness of
Giannuzzi-Savelli, there may be a certain overload of malacological
names (including a few non marine examples) compared to names related
to other taxa. I have also received some answers about biographical
information from different persons when asking questions to some of
the biological mailing lists. Thank you, all of you!
As can be seen, there are still several persons, for which I more or
less completely lack any information as well as several other lapses
in the list below (and certainly many omissions), so I would be happy
to hear from anybody, who could contribute with corrections or supply
supplementary or new information. It is not always easy to find
information of this kind when working in a Marine Biology Laboratory
almost 200 km away from a major scientific library.
The years after each person's name is always the life span (or at
least the year of birth for living persons - if known to the
compiler), never fl. for floruit (imerfectum, 3:rd person
singular of Latin florere = to flower), i.e. years of activity
within a special field, which often is used in other biographical
sources when life span is not known.
Regarding the spelling of author names, the most common spelling
hopefully usually is used, although e.g. some transliterations of
e.g. Cyrillic or Chinese names may sometimes be a bit odd due to the
compiler's unexperience of other spellings than that given here.
Often, however, some alternative spellings are given. In most
languages the family name or "surname" are as a rule inherited from
one generation to another, but there are exeptions. In e.g. Ethiopian
tradition there are no family names, but the father's name is
appended after the individual name and then lost in the next
generation, because then there is a new father, but very few
Ethiopians are involved in names of marine creatures. Prefixes to
names, like af, de, di, d', van, von, 't, and ten are usually
neglected in the alphabetical order of family names, except for Mac,
Mc, and M' (see below), O' and in some cases of De, de, Dell', Delle,
Della, Van, and Van der, when eponyms suggest that they are strongly
connected to the rest of the name. (Often, however, in alphabetical
accounts of Dutch names "van" and "van der" are dropped, while "de"
is not and all are spelled with lower case initials; in Belgium all
such names usually are retained in alphabetical accounts and spelled
with upper case first initials; in South Africa they all usually also
are retained in alphabetical accounts and spelled with lower case
first initial if forenames or forename initials are included, but
with upper case first initial if no forename or forename initials
precede them).
N.B. The Scandinavian alphabetical order is used, i.e. the
extra 3 letters used in Scandinavia (å,
ä = æ & ö = ø) are placed last in the alphabet and the German letter ü is equalized with y. (A German letter looking like ß should be interpreted as ss, i.e. a duoble s, because the letter is a remain from the Fraktur style, long used in Germany, which had two different signs for s, one long (looking like f, but without the horizontal line) - inside words - and the normal looking short s in the end of words, so ß is simply a combination of those two different s-signs). Names beginning with Mc or M' are treated like names beginning with Mac in the alphabetical order of the list.
Hans G. Hansson - 1997-11-14. Latest changes . # mentioned persons: around 8000, but 40-45% of these still with very incomplete information. (The "Latest changes function" does not work any more after a sever change, but occasional changes have been done at least until April 2008)