Ernest Haeckel Facts

Ernest Haeckel Facts
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel ( 16 February 1834 to 9 August 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species.
Interesting Ernest Haeckel Facts:
He was born in 1834 in Potsdam Germany.
He studied medicine in Berlin and Wurzburg and obtained an M.D. in 1857.
Haeckel continued his studies at the University of Jena for three more years and earned a PhD in zoology.
From, 1859 to 1867 he worked on radiolarians, poriferans and annelids and named 150 species of radiolarians.
From 1862 - 1909 he was a professor of comparative anatomy at the University of Jena.
Haeckel spent 1866-1867 in the Canary Islands where he met Charles Darwin.
He continued to travel extensively as a researcher.
In 1869 he visited Norway, in 1871 he lived in Croatia, and in 1873 he went to Turkey, Egypt, and Greece.
Haeckle believed that racial characteristics were acquired through environmental factors, a theory flatly denied by scientists today.
Haeckel's ideas of evolutionary racism, his calls for racial purity among the German people and his claims that the Caucasian race was the most advanced and most civilized, fueled the rise of Nazism in Germany.
He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology.
In 1866 he proposed the new kingdom Protista that is used for microorganisms today.
During his 47 years as a professor at the University of Jena he produced 42 works comprising some 13,000 pages and many scientific illustrations and monographs.
In 1868 he published a popular and lavishly illustrated book explaining his version of Darwinism, Naturiliche Schopfungsgeschichte which was translated into English in 1876 as The History of Creation.
In 1887 he published the Challenger Report Radiolaria which was illustrated with 140 plates and named over 4000 new species.


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