Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg

Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg was a German naturalist, zoologist, botanist, comparative anatomist, geologist and microscopist born April 19, 1795, in Delitzsch, Germany, who died June 27, 1876, in Berlin, and who served as a professor of medicine at the University of Berlin while conducting extensive expeditions through Egypt, the Libyan Desert, the Nile valley and the Red Sea between 1820 and 1825 that yielded thousands of specimens. Across nearly thirty years of microscopic research and roughly four hundred scientific publications, he described thousands of new taxa including flagellates, ciliates, diatoms, radiolaria, foraminifera and dinoflagellates, publishing his major work Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen in 1838 and founding the discipline of micropaleontology with Mikrogeologie in 1854. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1836 and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1837, and he received the Wollaston Medal in 1839 and, posthumously, the Leeuwenhoek Medal in 1877.