Carl Jakob Sundevall was a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 zoologist.
Sundevall studied at Lund University

Lund University

Lund University , located in the city of Lund in the province of Scania, Sweden, is one of northern Europe's most prestigious universities and one of Scandinavia's largest institutions for education and research, frequently ranked among the world's top 100 universities...

, where he became a Ph.D. in 1823. After traveling to East Asia, he studied medicine, graduating as Doctor of Medicine in 1830.

He was employed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History

Swedish Museum of Natural History

The Swedish Museum of Natural History , in Stockholm, is one of two major museums of natural history in Sweden, the other one being located in Gothenburg....

, Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

 from 1833, and was professor and keeper of the vertebrate

Vertebrate

Vertebrates are animals that are members of the subphylum Vertebrata . Vertebrates are the largest group of chordates, with currently about 58,000 species described. Vertebrates include the jawless fishes, bony fishes, sharks and rays, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds...

 section from 1839 to 1871. He wrote Svenska Foglarna (1856-87) which described 238 species of birds observed in Sweden. He classified a number of birds collected in southern Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

 by Johan August Wahlberg

Johan August Wahlberg

Johan August Wahlberg was a Swedish naturalist and explorer.Wahlberg started studying chemistry at the University of Uppsala in 1829, and later forestry, agronomy and natural science, graduating from the Institute of Forestry in 1834...

. In 1835, he developed a phylogeny for the birds based on the muscles of the hip and leg that contributed to later work by Thomas Huxley

Thomas Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....

. He then went on to examine the arrangement of the deep plantar tendon

Tendon

A tendon is a tough band of fibrous connective tissue that usually connects muscle to bone and is capable of withstanding tension. Tendons are similar to ligaments and fasciae as they are all made of collagen except that ligaments join one bone to another bone, and fasciae connect muscles to other...

s in the bird's foot. This latter information is still used by avian taxonomists. Sundevall was also an entomologist and arachnologist and in 1862 wrote a monograph proposing a universal phonetic alphabet

Phonetic alphabet

Phonetic alphabet can mean:* phonetic transcription system: a system for transcribing the precise sounds of human speech into writing.** International Phonetic Alphabet : the most widespread such system...

, Om phonetiska bokstäver.