NAT-LAB - Portoferraio / Room 1

You will be pleased to know that when you walk into the first hall, 6 of the most important naturalists in history will be there to welcome you, each holding a sentence or a funny episode or a comment that has made both what he has studied and also what he has accomplished stand out.

Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1655)

He is without a doubt the founder of natural science and a valid reference point for today's Italian naturalists. He was an Italian explorer and naturalist who studied both botany and entomology, and he created one of the first, natural history museums. As far back as the early seventeenth century he is looked upon as one of the most important figures in the world of science, and it is thanks to him that the word "Geology" came to exist in 1603. His books and works are in the university library of Bologna, while his scientific material is on show in the Palazzo Poggi Museum (Bologna).

Georges Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon (1708-1788)

He was a French naturalist, mathematician and cosmologist, and his theories were the scientific base for Lamarck and Darwin after him. He collected plants and animals before C. Darwin, and started to classify them following a new method that he called "Binomiale", and contrary to what you might initially think, Buffon actually had already had the idea but it was Linneo who perfected it some years later. Buffon classified organisms under the title of "similar" while Linneo used a much larger quantity of morphological names.

Carl von Linné (1707-1778)

In Italian his name was turned into "Carlo Linneo". He was a Swedish doctor, botanist and naturalist and was considered the father of today's scientific classification of organisms. In 1735 he brought out the taxonomic system for the first time of the "Binomial nomenclature", through which each organism is given two names (that had to be in Latin):the first refers to the "Category" that the actual organism belongs to, and is the same for all the species that share many of the main characteristics, while the second, often descriptive, decides the "Species" in which it is classified.

Jean Baptiste de Lamark (1744-1829)

He was a French naturalist, zoologist and botanist and was the first to use the word "biology" and to elaborate the first evolution theory of living organisms in 1809 known as "Lamarckismo" that was based on how the characteristics acquired were then adaptated and inherited. According to Lamark, all living organisms were simply the result of a gradual process of modification that came about under the deep influence of environmental conditions. Lamarck was the first naturalist to put an evolutionary theory forward that declared the mutation of the species over the years, and this concept made the world of biological science even further away from that of ceation.

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

He was a French biologist and naturalist who dedicated his life to three, major fields: molluscs, fish and Mammal and Rectile fossils, but the field he is best known for and the one his name is best associated with is that of the osteology of the three groups. His most famous work, published in 1817, is "Regne animal distribué d'après son organisation". Cuvier put the results of all his previous research on the structure of both living and estinct animals. Four years later, obviously feeling very full of himself, he insisted that no new species of animals would have been discovered, but as we all know this was and is not the case. With Lamarck, his theory was that most of the living organisms of the past would have become extinct due to several natural disasters, and that after each one, the animal population would consist only of those that had managed to survive.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

He was an English explorer, biologist, naturalist and anthropologist, and he is famous thanks to his theory on the evolution of the species from a natural selection depending on hereditary factors, how they are all different, how they breed and multiply from one ancestor that they have in common, as can be read in his "L'origine delle specie per selezione naturale" written in 1859. His theory was the result of a great quantity of data collected on his famous "journey around the world" on the "Beagle" ship, especially when they stopped at the Galàpagos Islands.