Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Wilhelm Peters
Summary
Wilhelm Karl Hartwich (or Hartwig) Peters (22 April 1815 in Koldenbüttel – 20 April 1883) was a German naturalist and explorer.
He was assistant to the anatomist Johannes Peter Müller and later became curator of the Berlin Zoological Museum. Encouraged by Müller and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Peters travelled to Mozambique via Angola in September 1842, exploring the coastal region and the Zambesi River. He returned to Berlin with an enormous collection of natural history specimens, which he then described in Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique... in den Jahren 1842 bis 1848 ausgeführt (1852–1882). The work was comprehensive in its coverage, dealing with mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, river fish, insects and botany. He replaced Martin Lichtenstein as curator of the museum in 1858, and in the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In a few years, he greatly increased the Berlin Museum's herpetological collection to a size comparable to those of Paris and London. Herpetology was Peters' main interest, and he described 122 new genera and 649 species from around the world.
Wilhelm Peters is commemorated in the scientific names of several species:
Reptiles, including
Andinosaura petrorum,
Anolis petersii,
Geophis petersii,
Hebius petersii,
Morenia petersi, and
Tracheloptychus petersi.
Fish
An African freshwater elephantfish, Gnathonemus petersii, known commonly as Peters's elephantnose fish.
The African Fish Distichodus petersii Pfeffer, 1896
Geographic
Peters Bay in NE Greenland was named after him by Carl Koldewey during the 1869–1870 Second German North Polar Expedition.
Sometimes, W. Peters is used to prevent confusion with herpetologists Günther Peters and James A. Peters.
His older brother was the German-born American Astronomer Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters.
Category:Taxa named by Wilhelm Peters
Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique. Band 1: Zoologie / Säugethiere .
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.