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William Paley
Best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
was a soldier, biologist, academic, and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. He gave the term biology a broader meaning by coining the term for special sciences, chemistry, meteorology, geology, and botany-zoology. -
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology -
Charles Lyell
best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. -
Richard Owen
Richard Owen gave the dinosaurs their name and brought us the Natural History Museum. Although celebrated for his scientific achievements, he's also remembered as a controversial figure. -
Samuel Wilberforce
Remembered for his legendary encounter with Thomas Huxley. The two men publicly argued the case for and against Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution by natural selection. Their meeting is now acclaimed as a landmark in the history of science. -
Alfred Russel Wallace
Prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace Line that divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. -
Thomas Henry Huxley
An English biologist, best known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution -
Charles Darwin
He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding
