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German botanist Otto Brunfels publishes Living images of plants the first serious work of natural history with printed illustrations.
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Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin begins work classifying 6000 plants on a new binomial system of nomenclature
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Italian doctor Marcello Malpighi discovers the capillaries, thus completing the evidence for the circulation of the blood
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The Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek builds a microscope powerful enough for him to observe and describe the red corpuscles in blood
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With his powerful new microscope Leeuwenhoek observes spermatozoa in the semen of a dog
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English naturalist John Ray begins publication of his Historia Plantarum, classifying some 18,600 plants in 'mutual fertility' species
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Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus publishes a 'system of nature', capable of classifying all living things
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Captain Cook's distinguished passengers, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, collect valuable specimens of Pacific flora
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French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argues in Zoological Philosophy that creatures can inherit acquired characteristics
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A 12-year-old Dorset child, Mary Anning, discovers at Lyme Regis a 21 ft (6.4m) fossil of an icthyosaur
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French scientist Georges Cuvier introduces scientific palaeontology with his Research on the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds
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HMS Beagle sails from Plymouth to survey the coasts of the southern hemisphere, with Charles Darwin as the expedition's naturalist
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French zoologist Félix Dujardin identifies protoplasm, the viscous translucent substance common to all forms of life
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HMS Beagle reaches Falmouth, in Cornwall, after a voyage of five years, and Charles Darwin brings with him a valuable collection of specimens
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Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz completes his pioneering Poissons Fossiles ('Fossil Fish'), classifying more than 1500 categories
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An American clergyman, L.L. Langstroth, discovers the 'bee space', which becomes a standard feature of the modern beehive
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Austrian monk Gregor Mendel begins his study of pea plants in the garden of the Abbey of St Thomas in Brno
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English physician John Snow proves that cholera is spread by infected water (from a pump in London's Broad Street)
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The first Neanderthal man to be discovered is unearthed by quarry workers in the Neander valley, near Düsseldorf
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French chemist Louis Pasteur proves the existence of micro-organisms by showing that a liquid will only ferment if exposed to contamination from the air
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Charles Darwin is alarmed to receive in his morning post a paper by Alfred Russell Wallace, outlining very much his own theory of evolution
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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research
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Gregor Mendel reads a paper to the Natural History Society in Brno describing his discoveries in the field of genetics
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English polymath Francis Galton publishes Inquiries in Human Faculty, developing the theme of eugenics and coining the term
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In a paper to a congress in Madrid, on the 'psychology and psychopathology of animals', Ivan Pavlov announces his discovery of the conditioned reflex
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German biologists Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann discover the micro-organism Treponema pallidum which causes syphilis
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English physiologists William Bayliss and Ernest Starling coin the word 'hormone' for glandular secretions into the bloodstream
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English biologist William Bateson uses the word 'genetics' to describe the phenomenon of heredity and variation
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Karl Landsteiner classifies the main human blood groups as A, B, AB and O
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US geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan establishes the chromosome theory of heredity through his study of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster
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Martha, 29 years old and the last passenger pigeon in the world, dies in the Cincinnati zoo in Ohio
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New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies sets up a plastic surgery unit at Aldershot, a British military base
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Canadian physiologists Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate insulin from the pancreas for the treatment of diabetes
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Biology teacher John Scopes is prosecuted for breaking state law by teaching evolution to his class of children in Dayton, Tennessee
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Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch demonstrates that bees communicate the whereabouts of food by means of a dance
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Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovers a mold that selectively kills bacteria, and calls it penicillin
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The Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz describes his experiments on young geese, with their capacity to imprint on human beings
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German-born British scientist Hans Krebs discovers the biochemical cycle that becomes known by his name
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US psychologist B.F. Skinner trains laboratory rats to use their brains in his 'Skinnner box'
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Karl von Frisch demonstrates that bees make use of the polarized light of the sun to calculate direction
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Molecular biologists Francis Crick and James Watson announce their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA
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US environmentist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, an impassioned warning of ecological disaster
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Donald Johanson and Tom Gray find an almost complete Australopithecus female skeleton at Hadar in Ethiopia, and nickname her Lucy after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
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Luc Montagnier, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, discovers a new human retrovirus that he names LAV (later changed to HIV)
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Genetic (or DNA) fingerprinting is invented and developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys
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The Human Genome Project begins in the US Department of Energy, with the aim of sequencing the whole of human DNA
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Mad Cow Disease (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy ) is identified and described in Britain
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British primatologist Jane Goodall publishes Through a Window, exposing violence and brutality in chimpanzees
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The fossilized skeleton of an Ardipithecus female, nicknamed Ardi and 4.4 million years old, is found in the Awash valley region of Ethiopia
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A fatal variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease) is first identified in Britain, linked to BSE but capable of infecting humans
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Dolly the Sheep is cloned in an epoch-making experiment at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh
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Chromosome 22 becomes the first human genome to be fully sequenced, at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England
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A White House ceremony celebrates a full draft of the human genome completed by two rival projects
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Geneticist Craig Venter announces that his team have inserted the genome of a bacterium into a cell to create the world's first synthetic life form