Sir Charles Lyell (1797 to 1875) established in his Principles of Geology (1830 to 1833) the principle of uniformitarianism.

. natural forces, acting over long periods of time, could explain the formation of fossil-bearing rocks. geological studies led him to conclude that the earths age must be measured in millions of years.

Charles Darwin (1809-82)

Darwins Theory of Evolution published his famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in England in 1859 neo-Darwinism to describe Darwins theories as modified by chromosomal theory of inheritance by Gregor Mendel in 1900s Natural selection rests on three propositions. First, there is variation among organisms (within populations) for anatomical, behavioral, and physiological traits. Second, the variation is at least partly heritable so that offspring tend to resemble their parents. Third, organisms with different variant forms are expected to leave different numbers of offspring to future generations. Variants that permit their possessors most effectively to exploit their environments will preferentially survive to be transmitted to future generations. Over many generations, favorable new traits will spread throughout a population. Accumulation of such changes leads, over long periods of time, to production of new organismal characteristics and new species. Natural selection is therefore a creative process that generates novel forms from the small individual varia- tions that occur among organisms within a population

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) co-discovered the process of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin. Wallace's Standard wing Bird of Paradise, Semioptera wallaceii, discovered by Alfred Russel Wallace in South east Asia and named after him This specimen of the butterfly Asterope sapphira was collected by Henry Walter Bates, the travelling companion of Alfred Russel Wallace, in the Amazon in the 1850s.

Willi Hennig (1913-76)

Hennig proposed the practice of taxonomy as a series of tests of hypotheses. Introduced cladistics A clade is a group of organisms that share characters, and by extension, a common ancestor. 1960's when Hennig's book Phylogenetic Systematics (it was published in 1950 in German as Grundzge einer Theorie der Phylogenetischen Systematik) was first translated into English and came into British and American academic circles. lead to the discovery that birds and dinosaurs are more closely related to each other than either is to reptiles.

A cladogram as a nested hierarchy of taxa among five sampled chordate groups (Amphioxus, bass, lizard, horse, monkey).

Ernst Haeckel
1874 by the German biologist An early tree of life drawn strongly influenced by Darwins theory of common descent. Many of the phylogenetic hypotheses shown in this tree, including the unilateral progression of evolution toward humans ( Menschen, top), have been refuted.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) Linnaeus and the birth of modern taxonomy Developed sexual system of plants as basis of classifying plants In 1753 he published a book called Species Plantarum Systema Naturae 1759 for animal naming Specimen of red maple, Acer rubrum, used by Linnaeus. Rubus idaeus L. Rubus (the genus name) idaeus (the species name) Linnaeus (the botanist who coined the name, often abbreviated). Homo sapiens, which means 'thinking man Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744 to 1829) French naturalist who offered the first scientific explanation of evolution. Lamarcks hypothesis that evolution proceeds by inheritance of acquired characteristics has been rejected and replaced by neo-Darwinian theories. Inheritance of acquired characteristics organisms, by striving to meet the demands of their environments, acquire adaptations and pass them by heredity to their offspring. According to Lamarck, the giraffe evolved its long neck because its ancestors lengthened their necks by stretching to obtain food and then passed the lengthened neck to their offspring. Over many generations, these changes accumulated to produce the long necks of modern giraffes. - theory of use and disuse