Hugh Falconer

Hugh Falconer was a Scottish geologist, botanist, palaeontologist and palaeoanthropologist born February 29, 1808, in Forres, Scotland, who died January 31, 1865, in London, and who trained at the University of Aberdeen and earned his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1829 before joining the Bengal establishment of the British East India Company as assistant surgeon in 1830. He served as superintendent of the Saharanpur Botanical Garden from 1832 to 1842 and later of the Calcutta Botanical Garden, conducted pioneering fossil mammal research in the Siwalik Hills, and introduced tea cultivation and cinchona plants to India. He is credited with among the first discoveries of a fossil ape and described the dwarf elephant species Palaeoloxodon falconeri and the giant swan Cygnus falconeri, and his 1863 monograph is regarded as containing an early statement of what later became known as punctuated equilibrium. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1845, served as its vice president from 1863 to 1864, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1837 jointly with Proby Cautley.