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John McClelland (doctor)
Sir John McClelland (1805–1883) was a British medical doctor with interests in geology and biology, who worked for the East India Company. In 1835 he was sent on a mission (Tea Committee) to identify if tea could be grown in north-eastern India along with Nathaniel Wallich and William Griffith. This mission ran into troubles with the members of the group. McClelland was appointed 1836 as the secretary of the "Coal Committee", the forerunner of the Geological Survey of India (GSI), formed to explore possibilities to exploit Indian coal. He was the first to propose hiring professional geologists for the task. He was also involved in surveys of forests and his reports led to the establishment of the Forest Department in India. He also served as an interim superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden from 1846 to 1847 and was editor of the ''Calcutta Journal of Natural History'' from 1841–1847. Legacy McClelland is commemorated in the name of the mountain bulbul, ''Ixos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Günther
Albert Karl Ludwig Gotthilf Günther FRS, also Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther (3 October 1830 – 1 February 1914), was a German-born British zoologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. Günther is ranked the second-most productive reptile taxonomist (after George Albert Boulenger) with more than 340 reptile species described. Early life and career Günther was born in Esslingen in Swabia (Württemberg). His father was a ''Stiftungs-Commissar'' in Esslingen and his mother was Eleonora Nagel. He initially schooled at the Stuttgart Gymnasium. His family wished him to train for the ministry of the Lutheran Church for which he moved to the University of Tübingen. A brother shifted from theology to medicine, and he, too, turned to science and medicine at Tübingen in 1852. His first work was "''Ueber den Puppenzustand eines Distoma''". He graduated in medicine with an M.D. from Tübingen in 1858, the same year in which he published a handbook of zoology for students of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Day
Francis Talbot Day (2 March 1829 – 10 July 1889) was an army surgeon and naturalist in the Madras Presidency who later became the Inspector-General of Fisheries in India and Burma. A pioneer ichthyologist, he described more than three hundred fishes in the two-volume work on ''The Fishes of India''. He also wrote the fish volumes of the Fauna of British India series. He was also responsible for the introduction of trout into the Nilgiri hills, for which he received a medal from the French Societe d'Acclimatation. Many of his fish specimens are distributed across museums with only a small fraction deposited in the British Museum (Natural History Museum, London), an anomaly caused by a prolonged conflict with Albert Günther, the keeper of zoology there. Biography Day was born in Maresfield, East Sussex, the third son of William and Ann Elliott née Le Blanc. The family estate included two thousand acres with forty tenant farmers during his childhood. William Day was inter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ray-finned Fish
Actinopterygii (; ), members of which are known as ray-finned fishes, is a class of bony fish. They comprise over 50% of living vertebrate species. The ray-finned fishes are so called because their fins are webs of skin supported by bony or horny spines (rays), as opposed to the fleshy, lobed fins that characterize the class Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish). These actinopterygian fin rays attach directly to the proximal or basal skeletal elements, the radials, which represent the link or connection between these fins and the internal skeleton (e.g., pelvic and pectoral girdles). By species count, actinopterygians dominate the vertebrates, and they constitute nearly 99% of the over 30,000 species of fish. They are ubiquitous throughout freshwater and marine environments from the deep sea to the highest mountain streams. Extant species can range in size from ''Paedocypris'', at , to the massive ocean sunfish, at , and the long-bodied oarfish, at . The vast majority of Actinoptery ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Garra
''Garra'' is a genus of fish in the family Cyprinidae. These fish are one example of the "log suckers", sucker-mouthed barbs and other cyprinids commonly kept in aquaria to keep down algae. The doctor fish of Anatolia and the Middle East belongs in this genus. The majority of the more than 140 species of garras are native to Asia, but about one-fifth of the species are from Africa (East, Middle and West, but by far the highest species richness in Ethiopia). The genus was established by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in 1822 as a subgenus of ''Cyprinus'' (which at that time was a " wastebin, basket genus" for carp-like cyprinids); though it didn't lead to an act of him to designate a type species by the time. However, as no other garras except the newly discovered '' G. lamta'' were known to science in 1822, this was designated as the type species by Pieter Bleeker in 1863. The garras and their closest relatives are sometimes placed in a subfamily Garrinae, but this seems hardly wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
