The Great Naturalists

Thames & Hudson: 2007

9780500251393

Credit: NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

For millennia, people have observed, recorded and documented the living world and attempted to make sense of it. The Great Naturalists (Thames & Hudson, 2007) charts the history of natural history through the lives of 40 such people over the past 2,000 years.

Alongside the expected names — Aristotle, Linnaeus, Darwin — this handsome volume celebrates the lives and works of many lesser-known figures, including Konrad Gessner, the sixteenth-century writer of Historia Animalium and Historia Plantarum, and Mary Anning, who discovered the first plesiosaur.

Four sections — 'The Ancients', 'The Renaissance', 'The Enlightenment' and 'The 19th Century' — all beautifully illustrated, often by the naturalists, show how the desire for striking images collided with the need for accurate documentation. Pictured is Georges Cuvier's giant ground sloth (Megatharium) skeleton.