Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley had almost no formal schooling and taught himself comparative anatomy well enough to become, by some accounts, the finest practitioner of the later 19th century. He worked through invertebrates first, then vertebrates, and after studying Archaeopteryx alongside Compsognathus concluded correctly that birds descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs. In 1860 he nearly skipped the Oxford debate on evolution but stayed after a chance encounter, then spent the next decades as Darwin's most vocal defender — even while privately doubting gradualism and remaining uncertain about na…