Haeckel" redirects here. For other uses, see Haeckel (disambiguation).
Ernst Haeckel
Born (1834-02-16)February 16, 1834
Potsdam
Died August 9, 1919(1919-08-09) (aged 85)
Jena
Nationality German
Notable awards Linnean Medal (1894)
Darwin–Wallace Medal (Silver, 1908)
Author abbrev. (zoology) Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel
Sea anemones from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of Nature) of 1904
Ernst Haeckel: Christmas of 1860 (age 26)
Haeckel (left) with Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai, his assistant, in the Canaries, 1866Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919[1]) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, "Art Forms of Nature"). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträtsel (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching[2] to support teaching evolution.