The German Scientist Ernst mayr made decisive and revolutionary contributions to avian taxonomy, as well as to the evolution and genetics of populations. Widely credited as the world’s greatest evolutionary biologist in history, Mayr was affectionately called the “20th century Darwin“.
Ernst Walter Mayr He was born in Kempten (Germany) on July 5, 1904, his father was a lawyer who died when he was 13 years old. Ernst He showed since childhood his interest in ornithology. He attended the University of Greifswald in 1923 and subsequently obtained his doctorate in ornithology from the University of Berlin in 1926, at the age of only 21.
Mayr he remained at the university to lead expeditions to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, where he explored the variations between animals and plants on different islands. In 1932 he joined the New York Museum of Natural History, as a curator, where he wrote more than 100 magazine articles on the taxonomy of birds.
Ernst mayr He addressed the concept of species by saying that a species was not simply a group of morphologically closer individuals, but a group reproductively isolated from other related groups. The peripatric speciation theory of Mayr it is considered a major mode of speciation in ornithology.
In 1953 Mayr he became Professor of Zoology at Harvard University, retiring in 1979 as Professor Emeritus. He died in Bedford, Massachusetts on February 3, 2005, at the age of 100.