George Robert Gray

George Robert Gray FRS (July 8, 1808 - May 6, 1872) was an English zoologist and author and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum in London for forty-one years. He was the younger brother of John Edward Gray and the son of the botanist Samuel Frederick Gray.

George Gray's most important publication was his "Genera of Birds" (1844-49), illustrated by David William Mitchell and Joseph Wolf, which included 46,000 references.

Biography

Gray started at the British Museum as Assistant Keeper of the Zoology Branch in 1831. He began by cataloguing insects, and published an "Entomology of Australia" (1833) and contributed the entomogical section to an English edition of Georges Cuvier's "Animal Kingdom". Gray described many species of Lepidoptera.

In 1833, he was a founder of what became the Royal Entomological Society of London.

Gray's original description of the Gray's Grasshopper Warbler which was named for him appeared in 1860. The specimen had been collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the Moluccas.

Works

*"The Entomology of Australia, in a series of Monographs. Part I. The Monograph of the Genus Phasma". London.
*1846 "Descriptions and Figures of some new Lepidopterous Insects chiefly from Nepal". London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
*1871 "A fasciculus of the Birds of China". London, Taylor and Francis.
*with Richard Bowdler Sharpe, "The Zoology of the Voyage of" HMS Erebus & HMS Terror. "Birds of New Zealand"., 1875. The revised edition of Gray (1846) (1875).

External links

* [http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/stick-insects/papers/gray1833/index.html Plates and text from Gray's 1833 Monograph on Phasmidae]

thumb|230px|left|Plate 8 from The Monograph of the Genus "Phasma"

References

*"Biographies for Birdwatchers", Mearns and Mearns, ISBN 0-12-487422-3