Blasius Merrem was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 naturalist

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

.

Merrem was born at Bremen, and studied at the university of Göttingen  under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, physiologist and anthropologist, one of the first to explore the study of mankind as an aspect of natural history, whose teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to classification of what he called human races, of which he determined...

. He developed an interest in zoology

Zoology

Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...

, particularly ornithology

Ornithology

Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and the aesthetic appeal of birds...

. He is remembered chiefly as the first ornithologist to propose a division of birds into Ratitae (ratite

Ratite

A ratite is any of a diverse group of large, flightless birds of Gondwanan origin, most of them now extinct. Unlike other flightless birds, the ratites have no keel on their sternum—hence the name from the Latin ratis...

s or running birds, with a flat sternum) and (carinatae

Carinatae

This article is about bird taxonomy; for the topic in pottery and glassware design, see Carinate.The Carinatae are, in phylogenetic taxonomy, the last common ancestor of the Neornithes and Ichthyornis , and all its descendants...

or flying birds, with a keeled sternum), which formed part of his classification of birds in Tentamen Systematis Naturalis Avium, published in Berlin in 1816 (in Abhandlugen Akad. Wiss. Berlin 1812–1813: Phys. Kl.).