George Busk

George Busk was a British naval surgeon, zoologist and palaeontologist born August 12, 1807, in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, who died August 10, 1886, in London, United Kingdom, and who served as assistant-surgeon at Greenwich Hospital from 1832 and as naval surgeon aboard HMS Grampus and HMS Dreadnought, founded the Greenwich Natural History Society in 1852, serving as its president until 1858, and later held the Hunterian Professorship of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1856 to 1859, becoming its president in 1871. A leading authority on Polyzoa, or bryozoans, he also made observations on cholera and scurvy during his naval service, brought the Gibraltar skull, the second Neanderthal fossil discovered, to England in 1862, edited the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science from 1853 to 1868, served as president of the Anthropological Institute from 1873 to 1874, nominated Charles Darwin for the Copley Medal in 1864, and was a member of the X-Club founded by Thomas Henry Huxley. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1850, received the Royal Medal in 1871 and the Lyell Medal in 1878, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1885.