John Edward Gray

Born in 1800 to a pharmacologist father and with a younger brother who also became a zoologist, Gray joined the British Museum and rose to keeper of zoology in 1840. Over the next three decades he published catalogue after catalogue of the collections, each one a working text that described animal groups in detail and named species no one had classified before. By the time he stepped down at Christmas 1874, months before his death in March 1875, the zoological holdings had been transformed into a reference collection that rivalled any on earth.