Zoologist in the context of "Disruptive coloration"

James Dewey Watson (April 6, 1928 – November 6, 2025) was an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he and Francis Crick co-authored an academic paper in Nature proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, building on research by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

Watson graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947 and received his doctorate from Indiana University Bloomington in 1950. After a post-doctoral year at the University of Copenhagen with Herman Kalckar and Ole Maaløe, Watson worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he met his future collaborator Francis Crick. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was employed by the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology.

A gill (/ɡɪl/ ) is a specialized respiratory organ that many aquatic animals use for aquatic gas exchange, i.e. to extract dissolved oxygen from water and to excrete carbon dioxide. Branchia (pl.: branchiae, from Ancient Greek βράγχια) is the zoologists' academic name for gills.

The gills of some semi-aquatic clades (e.g. crabs, terrestrial hermit crabs and amphibious fishes), have also adapted to allow air respiration (breathing) on land provided the gills are kept moist. In some terrestrial chelicerates species (tetrapulmonates such as spiders and scorpions), their ancestral gills have evolved into fully air-breathing book lungs. In some planktivorous bony fish species (e.g. silver and bighead carps), the gills are also used as a filter feeding organ via comb-like projections called gill rakers.

The Fauna (pl.: faunae or faunas) is the whole of animal life present in a particular region or time. The corresponding terms for plants and fungi are flora and funga, respectively. Flora, fauna, funga and other forms of life are collectively referred to as biota. Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess Shale fauna". Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils. The study of animals of a particular region is called faunistics.

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (/ˈhɛkəl/; German: [ɛʁnst ˈhɛkl̩]; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, ontogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the disproven but influential recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), wrongly claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny, using incorrectly drawn images of human embryonic development. Whether they were intentionally falsified, or drawn poorly by accident is a matter of debate.

The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895–1899; in English: The Riddles of the Universe, 1900), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.

Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity.

Introductory textbooks contrast Lamarckism with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. However, Darwin's book On the Origin of Species gave credence to the idea of heritable effects of use and disuse, as Lamarck had done, and his own concept of pangenesis similarly implied soft inheritance.

Johann Wilhelm Haacke (23 August 1855 – 6 December 1912) was a German zoologist born in Clenze, which is now Lower Saxony, who served as Director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide from 1882 to 1884.

Gustav Heinrich Theodor Eimer (22 February 1843 – 29 May 1898) was a German zoologist. He was a popularizer of orthogenesis, a form of directed evolution through mutations that made use of Lamarckian principles.