Jovan Hadži

Jovan Hadži (1884 to 1972) was a Slovenian zoologist of Serbian origin, born in a Serbian family in Temišvar, today Timișoara in Romania, then part of Austria-Hungary. He began his career in Zagreb, and in 1920 moved to Ljubljana, where he became head of the zoological institute at the newly established University of Ljubljana. From 1951 to 1972 he headed the Biological institute of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, of which he had been a full member since 1938. He proposed unique theories of animal evolution and devised a system that divided the animal kingdom into six phyla: Protozoa, Parazoa, Ameria, Oligomeria, Polymeria and Chordata. His contemporaries largely discredited the characters it used and zoologists never accepted the system, although its simplicity made it widely used in science education.