Leonardo Fea
Leonardo Fea (1852 in Turin, Piedmont – 1903) was an Italian explorer, zoologist, painter and naturalist.
Fea was born in Turin, and became an assistant at the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Genova the Museum of Natural History in Genoa. He made several foreign trips to collect specimens, including visits to Burma (1885) and the Cape Verde Islands (1898), islands in the Gulf of Guinea (1899/1900) and Portuguese West Africa. He spent four years in Burma, accumulating large collections of insects and birds. He then planned an expedition to Malaysia, but his poor health made it necessary to choose somewhere with a drier climate, hence his visit to the Cape Verdes. He was disappointed by the amount of wildlife he found there, but was still able to collect forty-seven species of birds, eleven of which were new for the islands. His collections are in the Genoa museum.
While on the Cape Verde Islands Fea collected a specimen of an unknown petrel. This was named Fea's Petrel in 1899 by his friend Tommaso Salvadori.
Several species have been named to commemorate his work[1] as naturalist and zoologist:
- Fea's short-legged toad, Brachytarsophrys feae (Boulenger, 1887)[2]
- Fea’s viper, Azemiops feae (Boulenger, 1888)
- Fea’s petrel, Pterodroma feae (Salvadori, 1899)
- Fea's tree rat, Chiromyscus chiropus (Thomas, 1891)
- Fea’s muntjac, Muntiacus feae (Thomas & Doria 1889)
References
- ↑ Rob Vaughan (2011). "A Zoological Who Was Who". The Bartlett Society. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
- ↑ Boulenger, G. A. (1887). "Description of a new frog of the genus Megalophrys". Annali del Museo civico di storia naturale di Genova 4: 512–513.
- Conci, C. 1975 Repertorio delle biografie e bibliografie degli scrittori e cultori italiani di entomologia Mem. Soc. Ent. Ital 48 1969(4) 817-1069.
- Conci, C. & Poggi, R. 1996 Iconography of Italian Entomologists, with essential biographical data Mem. Soc. Ent. Ital. 75 159-382.
- Gestro, A. 1904: [Fea, L.] Ann. Mus. Civ. Stor. Nat. Genova (3) 1(=41) 95-152, Portrait.
- O. Nalesini, L'Asia Sud-orientale nella cultura italiana. Bibliografia analitica ragionata, 1475-2005. Roma, Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, 2009, pp. 19–20 and 65-66 ISBN 978-88-6323-284-4.
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