Eduard Friedrich Eversmann

Alexander Eduard Friedrich Eversmann (23 January 1794 – 14 April 1860) was a biologist and explorer.

Eversmann was born in Westphalia and studied at the universities of Marburg, Halle, Berlin and Dorpat. He received his degree of Philosophy and Master of Liberal Sciences at Halle in 1814, and at Dorpat graduated as a Doctor of Medicine and Surgery in 1817. During the next three years he travelled in the southern Urals, collecting specimens and sending them to Hinrich Lichtenstein at the university of Berlin.

Eversmann had for a long time planned to travel into central Asia to collect natural history specimens. He had studied the languages, customs and Muslim religion of the peoples of the area. In 1820 he set of for Bukhara disguised as a merchant, a journey he described in Reise Orenburg nach Buchara (1823), with a natural history appendix by Lichtenstein. In 1825 he travelled with a military expedition to Khiva. In 1828 he was appointed professor of zoology and botany at the university of Kazan. During the next thirty years he wrote numerous publications and is considered the pioneer of research into the flora and fauna of the southeast steppes of Russia between the Volga and the Urals.

His name is commemorated in a number of birds, such as Eversmann's redstart,^[1] butterflies, including Eversmann's parnassian and moths, such as Eversmann's rustic.

In the scientific field of herpetology he is best known for having described two new species of lizards, Darevskia praticola and Darevskia saxicola.^[2]

References

• Mittheilungen ueber einige neue und einige weniger gekannte Säugethiere Russlands, in Bull. Soc. Imp. Nat. Mosc., 1840, t. XII, Moscow

• Mearns and Mearns - Biographies for Birdwatchers ISBN 0-12-487422-3