Johann Baptist von Spix

Johann Baptist von Spix was a German biologist, born in Hochstadt in 1781, the seventh of eleven children. He studied philosophy, theology and then medicine, and in 1808 was appointed a student of zoology at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. After a period in Paris learning scientific zoology from Georges Cuvier he returned to Munich, became the first conservator of the Bavarian zoological collection and published on marine animals, the history of zoological classification and, in 1815, a comparative study of skulls called Cephalogenesis. In 1817 he travelled to Brazil with Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, and the two collected and described plants, animals, peoples and fossils across the country, including the Amazon region. His specimens became a foundation of the National Zoological Collection in Munich. He died in 1826.