Alfred Newton

(1829 - 1907)

A founding member of the British Ornithologists’ Union, Alfred Newton in the mid-1850s began a decade-long journey throughout Europe and North America looking for information on the extinct great auk. He later wrote about the dodo and other extinct birds, pushed Parliament to protect those birds that hadn’t yet vanished, and was appointed the first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Cambridge.