Thomas Staughton Savage (June 7, 1804 in

Cromwell, Connecticut Cromwell is a town in Middlesex County, Connecticut, United States located in the middle of the state. The population was 14,225 at the 2020 census. The town was named after a shipping boat that traveled along the Connecticut River, which runs a ...

– December 27, 1880 in Rhinebeck, New York) was an American Protestant clergyman, missionary, physician, and naturalist. He attended

Yale College Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other Yale schools were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was officially known as Yale College until 1887, ...

and

Yale Medical School The Yale School of Medicine is the graduate medical school at Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813. The primary te ...

. His first marriage was to Susan A. Metcalfe September 28, 1838. He married his second wife, Maria Chapin, in 1842. It was after her death that he married Elizabeth Rutherford, granddaughter of the author

Eliza Fenwick Eliza Fenwick (; 1 February 1767 – 8 December 1840) was an English author, whose works include ''Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock'' (1795) and several children's books. She was born in Cornwall, married an alcoholic, and had two children by hi ...

, in 1844. He was the father of five children, Elizabeth Fenwick Savage (b. 1846), Alexander Duncan Savage (b. 1848), Thomas Rutherford Savage (b. 1852), William Rutherford Savage (b. 1854), Jesse Duncan Savage (b. 1858). He was the grandfather of the American artist Thomas Casilear Cole (1888-1976). In 1836 Savage was sent as a missionary to

Liberia Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...

. During his time in Africa he acquired the skull and bones from an unknown ape species, which he described in 1847 at the

Boston Society of Natural History The Boston Society of Natural History (1830–1948) in Boston, Massachusetts, was an organization dedicated to the study and promotion of natural history. It published a scholarly journal and established a museum. In its first few decades, the s ...

with American naturalist and

anatomist Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having its ...

Jeffries Wyman Jeffries Wyman (August 11, 1814 – September 4, 1874) was an American naturalist and anatomist, born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Wyman died in Bethlehem, New Hampshire of a pulmonary hemorrhage. Career He graduated Harvard College in 183 ...

Savage TS, Wyman J. (1847)
Notice of the external characters and habits of Troglodytes gorilla, a new species of orang from the Gaboon River, osteology of the same
Boston J Nat Hist 5:417–443. with the scientific name ''Troglodytes gorilla'', now known as the

western gorilla The western gorilla (''Gorilla gorilla'') is a great ape found in Africa, one of two species of the hominid genus ''Gorilla''. Large and robust with males weighing around , the hair is significantly lighter in color than the eastern gorilla, '' ...

.Conniff R. Discovering gorilla. Evolutionary Anthropology, 18: 55-61.

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Episcopal Church History * 1804 births 1880 deaths American Protestant missionaries American zoologists Yale School of Medicine alumni People from Cromwell, Connecticut {{US-zoologist-stub