Heinrich Georg Bronn

Heinrich Georg Bronn was a German geologist and paleontologist born March 3, 1800, in Ziegelhausen, now part of Heidelberg, who died July 5, 1862, in Heidelberg, and who earned a doctorate in medicine from the University of Heidelberg in 1821 before being appointed professor of natural history there the following year. He produced the Lethaea geognostica between 1834 and 1838, regarded as foundational to German stratigraphical geology, the multi-volume Index Palaeontologicus of 1848 and 1849 describing the fossil record, and the zoological Die Klassen und Ordnungen des Thier-Reichs beginning in 1859, and in 1858 he proposed an early tree of life diagram depicting genealogical relationships among organisms based on quantitative analysis of species appearance and disappearance in the fossil record. He produced the first German translation of Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species in 1860, adding his own critical commentary, was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1860, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1861.