Philadelphia Academy Of Natural Sciences
   HOME
*



picture info

Philadelphia Academy Of Natural Sciences
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, formerly the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the Americas. It was founded in 1812, by many of the leading naturalists of the young American republic with an expressed mission of "the encouragement and cultivation of the sciences". It has sponsored expeditions, conducted original environmental and systematics research, and amassed natural history collections containing more than 17 million specimens. The Academy also organizes public exhibits and educational programs for both schools and the general public. History During the first decades of the United States, Philadelphia was the cultural capital and one of the country's commercial centers. Two of the city's institutions, the Library Company and the American Philosophical Society, were centers of enlightened thought and scientific inquiry. The increasing sophistication of the earth and life scie ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since 1854, the city has been coextensive with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the Delaware Valley, the nation's seventh-largest and one of world's largest metropolitan regions, with 6.245 million residents . The city's population at the 2020 census was 1,603,797, and over 56 million people live within of Philadelphia. Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn, an English Quaker. The city served as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony during the British colonial era and went on to play a historic and vital role as the central meeting place for the nation's founding fathers whose plans and actions in Philadelphia ultimately inspired the American Revolution and the nation's inde ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Angelo Heilprin
Angelo Heilprin (March 31, 1853 – July 17, 1907) was an American geologist, paleontologist, naturalist, and explorer. He is mostly known for the part he took into the Peary expedition to Greenland of 1891–1892 and for his observations and photographs of the 1902 eruption of Montagne Pelée in Martinique. He also was a mountaineer and a painter. Biography Angelo Heilprin was born at Sátoraljaújhely, in the Zemplén County of the Kingdom of Hungary. His family was Jewish. He arrived in the United States from the Austrian Empire with his father Michael and his brother Louis in 1856. He went back to Europe in 1876 for two years to complete his education. He studied at the Royal School of Mines, London, at the Imperial Geological Institution of Vienna, and at Florence (where he had his only formal training in painting) and Geneva; he also went to Hungary, where he mountaineered in the Carpathians, and to Poland where he visited family for six months. He then became pr ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John James Audubon
John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin; April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was an American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. He was notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations, which depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book titled ''The Birds of America'' (1827–1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon is also known for identifying 25 new species. He is the eponym of the National Audubon Society, and his name adorns a large number of towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States. Dozens of scientific names first published by Audubon are still in use by the scientific community. Early life Audubon was born in Les Cayes in the French colony of Saint-Dom ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Alexander Von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 17696 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt's advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern Western scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in several volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Humboldt resurrected the use ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Georges Cuvier
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (; 23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier, was a French natural history, naturalist and zoology, zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils. Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phylum, phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification. Cuvier is also known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his ''Essay on the Theory of the Earth'' (1813) Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen is generally considered to have been an outstanding naturalist with a remarkable gift for interpreting fossils. Owen produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered today for coining the word '' Dinosauria'' (meaning "Terrible Reptile" or "Fearfully Great Reptile"). An outspoken critic of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Owen agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred, but thought it was more complex than outlined in Darwin's ''On the Origin of Species''. Owen's approach to evolution can be considered to have anticipated the issues that have gained greater attention with the recent emergence of evolutionary developmental biology. Owen was the first president of the Microscopical Society of London in 1839 and edited many issues of its journal – then known as ''The Microscopic Journal''. Owen also c ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Thomas Nuttall
Thomas Nuttall (5 January 1786 – 10 September 1859) was an England, English botany, botanist and zoologist who lived and worked in America from 1808 until 1841. Nuttall was born in the village of Long Preston, near Settle, North Yorkshire, Settle in the West Riding of Yorkshire and spent some years as an apprentice printer in England. Soon after going to the United States he met professor Benjamin Smith Barton in Philadelphia. Barton encouraged his strong interest in natural history. Early explorations in the United States In 1810 he travelled to the Great Lakes and in 1811 travelled on the Astor Expedition led by William Price Hunt on behalf of John Jacob Astor up the Missouri River. Nuttall was accompanied by the English botanist John Bradbury (naturalist), John Bradbury, who was collecting plants on behalf of Liverpool botanical gardens. Nuttall and Bradbury left the party at the trading post with the Arikara Indians in South Dakota, and continued farther upriver with Rams ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


John Edwards Holbrook
John Edwards Holbrook (December 31, 1796 – September 8, 1871) was an American zoologist, herpetologist, physician, and naturalist, born in Beaufort, South Carolina, the son of Silas Holbrook, a teacher, and Mary Edwards. Although Holbrook's memoir, written by his medical partner, and his tombstone both give the date 1794 for his birth, this is incorrect. Holbrook received his A.B. degree from Brown University in 1815, and his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1818. In 1827, he married Harriott Pinckney Rutledge (1802–1863), granddaughter of John Rutledge and a member of the Middleton-Rutledge-Pinckney family. He provided the first comprehensive illustrated account of North American amphibians and reptiles in the two editions of his ''North American Herpetology; or, A Description of the Reptiles Inhabiting the United States''. The first edition in four volumes (1836–1840) is very rare because Holbrook attempted to destroy all copies in a bonfire in his backyard over ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was previously the nation's second vice president of the United States, vice president under John Adams and the first United States Secretary of State, United States secretary of state under George Washington. The principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating Thirteen Colonies, American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation. He produced formative documents and decisions at state, national, and international levels. During the American Revolution, Jefferson represented Virginia in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence. As ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Alexander Wilson (ornithologist)
Alexander Wilson (July 6, 1766 – August 23, 1813) was a Scottish-American poet, ornithologist, Natural history, naturalist, and illustrator. Identified by George Ord as the "Father of American Ornithology", Wilson is regarded as the greatest American ornithologist prior to John James Audubon, Audubon. Biography Early life Wilson was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Paisley, Scotland on July 6, 1766. He was apprenticed as a weaver in 1779. Poetry and emigration While working as a weaver in Paisley, Wilson became seriously interested in poetry. He was inspired by the dialect verse of Robert Burns, who was only seven years older. He was close friends with fellow Paisley poet Ebenezer Picken. In addition to ballads and pastoral pieces, Wilson wrote satirical commentary on the conditions of weavers in the mills. His authorship of a satirical poem with severe personal statements about a mill owner resulted in Wilson's arrest. His work was said to be inflammatory and libelous; he ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Thomas Say
Thomas Say (June 27, 1787 – October 10, 1834) was an American entomologist, conchologist, and Herpetology, herpetologist. His studies of insects and shells, numerous contributions to scientific journals, and scientific expeditions to Florida, Georgia, the Rocky Mountains, Mexico, and elsewhere made him an internationally known naturalist. Say has been called the father of American descriptive entomology and American conchology. He served as librarian for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, curator at the American Philosophical Society (elected in 1817), and professor of natural history at the University of Pennsylvania. Early life and education Born in Philadelphia into a prominent Religious Society of Friends, Quaker family, Thomas Say was the great-grandson of John Bartram, and the great-nephew of William Bartram. His father, Dr. Benjamin Say, was brother-in-law to another Bartram son, Moses Bartram. The Say family had a house, "The Cliffs" at Gray's Ferry Bridge, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Charles Pickering (naturalist)
Charles Pickering (November 10, 1805 – March 17, 1878) was an American race scientist and naturalist. Biography Born on Starucca Creek, Upper Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, the grandson of Colonel Timothy Pickering, after the death of his father he was raised in the house of his esteemed grandfather in Wenham, Massachusetts. Despite his part in the student rebellion of 1823, he received a medical degree from Harvard University in 1826. A practicing physician in Philadelphia, he became active as librarian and curator at the city's Academy of Natural Sciences. Pickering went with the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 as one of its naturalists. Charles Wilkes, the expedition's commander, named Pickering Passage in honor of Charles Pickering. His journal of the Expedition was a major influence on Wilkes' ''Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition''. From 1842-43, Pickering curated the collection from the Wilkes Expedition, which was housed at the Patent Offi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]