Giuseppe Giovanni Antonio Meneghini

Giuseppe Giovanni Antonio Meneghini (1811 to 1889) was an Italian botanist, geologist and paleontologist, born in Padua. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Padua in 1834 and became assistant to the professor of botany, but was removed from his post in 1848 because of his association with revolutionaries in the First Italian War of Independence, and went into exile at Bologna, Pistoia and Florence. In 1849 he became professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of Pisa, where he later kept the chair of geology and directed the geological cabinet. He studied the geology of Tuscany, identified Triassic fossils, and worked across Italy and Sardinia, including Cambrian trilobites from Sardinia and ammonites from Lombardy and the Apennines, describing nearly 560 fossil taxa. He headed the Italian Geological Committee from 1879 and served as a senator of the Kingdom of Italy from 1886. The mineral meneghinite is named after him.