Johann Ludwig Christian Carl Gravenhorst (November 14, 1777 – January 14, 1857), sometimes Jean Louis Charles or Carl, 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...

 entomologist, herpetologist and zoologist.

Life

Gravenhorst was born in Braunschweig

Braunschweig

Braunschweig , is a city of 247,400 people, located in the federal-state of Lower Saxony, Germany. It is located north of the Harz mountains at the farthest navigable point of the Oker river, which connects to the North Sea via the rivers Aller and Weser....

. His early interest in insects was encouraged by two of his professors, both amateur entomologists. He entered the university of Helmstedt

University of Helmstedt

The University of Helmstedt, official Latin name: Academia Julia , was a university in Helmstedt in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel that existed from 1576 until 1810....

  to study law in 1797, but the death of his father two years later left him a great fortune, so he was able to change his direction. He enrolled at the university of Göttingen where he followed the courses of 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 returned to present his thesis to Helmstädt on a subject of entomology. He went to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 in 1802 and there met Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier

Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...

, Pierre André Latreille

Pierre André Latreille

Pierre André Latreille was a French zoologist, specialising in arthropods. Having trained as a Roman Catholic priest before the French Revolution, Latreille was imprisoned, and only regained his freedom after recognising a rare species he found in the prison, Necrobia ruficollis...

 and Alexandre Brongniart

Alexandre Brongniart

Alexandre Brongniart was a French chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist, who collaborated with Georges Cuvier on a study of the geology of the region around Paris...

. Parallel to his studies, he assembled, thanks to his financial means, a very important natural history collection. In 1805, he obtained a professorial chair in Göttingen and published the following year Monographie Coleopterorum.

Among his work, Gravenhorst's studies of the parasitic wasps is especially important but he also worked in herpetology. He settled in Frankfurt (Oder)

Frankfurt (Oder)

Frankfurt is a town in Brandenburg, Germany, located on the Oder River, on the German-Polish border directly opposite the town of Słubice which was a part of Frankfurt until 1945. At the end of the 1980s it reached a population peak with more than 87,000 inhabitants...

 in 1810 teaching natural history at the university of the city. The following year, the university was transferred to Breslau. There he became director of the Breslau Natural History Museum and installed his own collections there. He started to suffer from mental disorders after 1825 stopping all scientific work in the year 1840 and withdrawing completely into himself in 1856. He died in Breslau.

Achievements

Gravenhorst was a specialist in Staphylinidae and Ichneumonidae

Ichneumonidae

Ichneumonidae is a family within the insect order Hymenoptera. Insects in this family are commonly called ichneumon wasps. Less exact terms are ichneumon flies , or scorpion wasps due to the extreme lengthening and curving of the abdomen...

 describing many new species.He was also one of the first frog

Frog

Frogs are amphibians in the order Anura , formerly referred to as Salientia . Most frogs are characterized by a short body, webbed digits , protruding eyes and the absence of a tail...

 specialists.

Species described by Gravenhorst

• Ambystoma opacum, the marbled salamander of the eastern United States
  United States
  The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
  
  
• Rana cancrivora, now Fejervarya cancrivora
  Fejervarya cancrivora
  The Crab-eating Frog , formerly , is a frog native to south-eastern Asia including the Philippines and more rarely as far west as Orissa in India. It inhabits mangrove swamps and marshes and is the only known modern amphibian which can tolerate salt water...
  
  , the crab-eating frog of Malaysia and Thailand
  Thailand
  Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
  
   http://www.nre.cn/readarticle/htm/19/2003_9_23_1284.html
• Leiocephalus schreibersii, the red-sided curly-tailed lizard of the West Indies
• Xenochrophis melanzostus, the Andaman
  Andaman Islands
  The Andaman Islands are a group of Indian Ocean archipelagic islands in the Bay of Bengal between India to the west, and Burma , to the north and east...
  
   keelback snake

Works

• Monographia Coleopterorum Micropterorum. Göttingen: Henricus Dieterich, xvi+248 pp, tabula. (1802)

Click for PDF:http://www.toyen.uio.no/entomology/gusarov/Library/Gravenhorst.htm

• Coleoptera Microptera Brunsvicensia nec non exoticorum quotquot exstant in collectionibus entomologorum Brunsvicensium in genera familias et species distribuit. Braunschweig: Carolus Reichard, lxvi+207 pp. Gravenhorst, J.L.C (1806)

Click for PDF:http://www.toyen.uio.no/entomology/gusarov/Library/Gravenhorst.htm

• Ichneumologia Europaea. Vratislaviae, sumtibus auctoris. 3 volumes (including supplement). pp. xxxi, 827, (4); 989; 1097, with 2 engraved plates and 2 folded tables.(1829) - Contents I: Generalia, Ichneumones, Supplementa, Indices - II: Tryphones, Trogos, Alomyas, Cryptos - III: Pimplas, Metopios, Bassos, Banchos, Ophiones, Hellwigias, Acaenitas, Xoridas, Supplementa.

Collections

• Museum of Natural History at University of Wrocław
• Armenology Research National Center