Eugenius Johann Christoph Esper

Eugenius Johann Christoph Esper was a German zoologist and naturalist, born in Wunsiedel in Bavaria in 1742. Introduced to natural history with his brother Friedrich by their father, an amateur botanist, he was encouraged by his botany professor Casimir Christoph Schmidel to leave theology and study natural history instead. He took his doctorate at Erlangen in 1781, taught there from 1782 and directed its natural history department from 1805, and the university collections of minerals, birds, plants, shells and insects grew rapidly thanks to him. His life work was Die Schmetterlinge in Abbildungen nach der Natur, issued in booklets between 1776 and 1807 with 438 hand coloured plates, an important work on the butterflies of Germany following the Linnean system. He was also the first person to research palaeopathology, and he died in 1810.