Johann Friedrich Gmelin

Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1748 to 1804) was a German naturalist, chemist, botanist, entomologist, herpetologist and malacologist. The eldest son of Philipp Friedrich Gmelin, he was born in Tübingen, studied medicine under his father there and took his master's degree in 1768. He became an adjunct professor of medicine at Tübingen in 1769 and moved to Göttingen in 1773, where he was promoted in 1778 to full professor of medicine and professor of chemistry, botany and mineralogy. As a young man he was a respected colleague of Carl Linnaeus and collected plants in Persia on his behalf, and he later wrote textbooks on chemistry, pharmacy, mineralogy and botany. From 1788 to 1793 he edited the posthumous 13th edition of the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus, which is cited as the authority for more than 290 bird species. He died in Göttingen in 1804.