 |
 |
|
Found here are botanists and associated scientists who suffered unexpected, accidental or tragic deaths, often related to their work. Additionally, are some that passed very early in their careers, by whatever cause. Victims of violent crime are also included. Several botanists have died in the field (e.g., David Douglas, Alwyn Gentry), or died later from complications from injuries sustained in the field (e.g., Lloyd Shinners). Causes include automobile accidents, suicides, and murder. At keast one (Ernest Lee) was killed in action in WWI. Not included here are cases of common disease, such as cancer, no matter how tragic. However, we have included some who died from covid-19 infection, including Brian Axsmith, Wayne Whistler and Billie Turner. |
|
1831 - 1886 
Nils Ahlberg Nils Fredrik Ahlberg was a Swedish schoolteacher and botanist employed as Conservator of the Botanical Museum, Uppsala University. |
1963 - 2020 
Brian J. Axsmith Brian Axsmith was an American paleobotanist who studied a wide variety of Paleozoic and Mesozoic fossil plants including pteridosperms, gymnosperms and angiosperms. He died from covid-19 in 2020. |
1862 - 1933 
Evelyn B. Baldwin Evelyn Briggs Baldwin was an American meteorologist and explorer of the (north) polar regions, who supported himself by publishing accounts of his explorations in popular periodicals. He was fatally struck by a car in Washington, DC, at age 71. |
1858 - 1910 
Charles Barnes Charles Reid Barnes, a close associate of John Merle Coulter, was an American bryologist best known for having coined the term "photosynthesis" in 1893. |
1848 - 1922 
Jules Battandier Jules Aime Battandier was a French pharmacist, botanist, and plant collector who worked mainly in Algeria. |
|
1870 - 1931 
John Briquet John Briquet was a Swiss botanist and curator of the Conservatoire Botanique, Geneve, who in 1905 organized the first published Rules of Botanical Nomenclature. |
1905 - 1975 
Murray Buell Murray Fife Buell was an American plant ecologist and palynologist who conducted groundbreaking studies of land-management impacts on ecosystems. |
1869 - 1927 
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Pierre Cavalerie Pierre Julien Cavalerie was a French missionary and botanical collector. |
1911 - 1960 
Debabarta Chatterjee Debabarta Chatterjee was an Indian botanist and expert on the floras of India and Myanmar. He became superindendent of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Shibpur, where he was murdered by a member of the Garden's staff. |
1954 - 1987 
Michael Cichan Michael Anthony Cichan was an American paleobotanist who studied Carboniferous fossil plants. Cichan was tragically killed along with his wife and son in a plane crash just before taking his first job as a professor. |
|
1727 - 1773 
Philibert Commerson Philibert Commerson was a French physician, ichthyologist, and botanist, who accompanied Louis Antoine de Bougainville on the voyages of 1766-1769, exploring Tahiti, Samoa, and other South Pacific islands. Commerson disembarked in Reunion (then Ile de Bourbon) to explore there and in Madagascar and Mauritius, and died a few years later in Reunion at age 45. |
1809 - 1849 
August Corda August Joseph Corda was a Czech mycologist, plant anatomist and paleobotanist. He was tragically killed in the shipwreck of the Victoria in 1849 while returning from a fossil collecting trip in Texas, USA. Most of his collections from that trip were lost with him. |
1932 - 1987 Rolf Dahlgren Rolf Dahlgren was a Swedish-Danish plant systematist and educator who developed the "Dahlgren System" of angiosperm classification. |
1860 - 1932 
Anstruther Davidson Anstruther Davidson was a Scottish-American dermatologist, entomologist and botanist. He was connected to the Southern California Academy of Sciences, and was an expert on the southern California Flora. He co-published Flora of Southern California in 1923. Davidson's personal herbarium was deposited with the Los Angeles County Museum. |
1799 - 1834 
David Douglas David Douglas was a Scottish explorer and plant hunter who introduced hundreds of plants to England, and is best known as the discoverer and namesake of the Douglas fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii, in the Pacific Northwest. |
|
1793 - 1835 
Thomas Drummond Thomas Drummond was a Scottish botanist and plant collector who was an assistant on Sir John Franklin's second land expedition (United States and Canada), and later collected extensively in Texas. |
1915 - 1952 
William Fox William Basil Fox was an American botanist and educator who specialized in legumes, and who served on the faculty of North Carolina State College. At age 37, he had just returned from a collecting trip in Baja California when he was accidentally killed by his four-year-old son, who had gotten hold of a loaded rifle in their home. |
1823 - 1849
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
William Gambel William Gambel was an American physician and botanist, an associate of Thomas Nuttall, notable as the first botanist to collect in Santa Fe, NM, among other places. He died of typhoid at age 26, while attempting to reach California to set up a medical practice there. |
1945 - 1993 
Alwyn H. Gentry Alwyn Gentry was an American botanist and plant collector, who specialized in the Bignoniaceae and developed the "Gentry Forest Transect" method of assessing composition of tropical forests. |
1827 - 1863
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Sutton Hayes Sutton Hayes was an American plant collector who was also a U.S. Army surgeon. He collected in the southwestern US and Panama, where he died at the age of 35 after a long bout with tuberculosis. He sent many of his specimens to Kew. |
|
1870 - 1932 
Ralph Hoffmann Ralph Hoffmann was an American teacher, ornithologist, and botanist, noted as having authored the first true field guide to birds, A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York, in 1904. He eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, and collected plants extensively in the Channel Islands and Mexico. While collecting on San Miguel Island, he fell from a cliff to his death. |
1890 - 1917 
Ruth Holden Ruth Holden was an American paleobotanist and Red Cross nurse who died at the age of 26 during WWI. |
1785 - 1815
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Ellen Hutchins Ellen Hutchins was an Irish plant collector and botanical illustrator. She is considered to be Ireland's first female botanist. Ellen died at the age of 29 due to chronic illness probably exacerbated by treatments with mercury |
1852 - 1934
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Marcus Jones Marcus E. Jones was an American geologist and botanist who explored the American West. He was especially interested in the genus Astragalus, which he revised for North America in 1923. His personal herbarium was acquired by Pomona College (POM) and is today at California Botanic Garden (RSA). |
1903 - 1970 
George Jones George Neville Jones was an English-American plant taxonomist and collector who worked on a wide variety of plants from lycopods and ferns to various angiosperms. He was curator of the herbarium at the University of Illinois and published the Flora of Illinois in 1945. |
|
1900 - 1945 
Jose B. Juliano Jose B. Juliano was a Filipino plant anatomist on the faculty of the University of the Philippines, Manila. Juliano was killed by the retreating Japanese military forces toward the end of WWII, as were several of his colleagues. |
1886 - 1915
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Ernest Lee Ernest Lee was a British plant anatomist who was killed at the age of 29 in the trenches of World War I. |
1909 - 1942
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
David LeSueur David Hardeman LeSueur was an American botanist who collected mainly in Mexico and was expert on the flora of Chihuahua. |
1660 - 1709 
Edward Lhwyd Edward Lhwyd was a Welsh plant taxonomist, naturalist paleontologist, linguist, anthropologist and geographer who is credited with the first written record of a trilobite fossil. He died at age 49 of complications from asthma contracted on his travels |
1937 - 2006 
David Lloyd David G. Lloyd was a New Zealand evolutionary biologist who studied reproduction and pollination in plants, and contributed to early theory on the evolution of heterostyly and sex in plants. |
|
1911 - 1958
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Evelyn Maino Evelyn Maino was co-author and illustrator of An Illustrated Manual of Pacific Coast Trees and produced illustrations from live material for Ornamental Trees |
1885 - 1944 
Marie-Victorin Brother Marie-Victorin, as he was generally known, was a Canadian Catholic monk, university professor, and botanist centered in Quebec. He founded the Montreal Botanical Garden and in 1935 published Flore Laurentienne. |
1909 - 1988 
Margaret Mee Margaret Mee was an English botanical artist and field botanist who traveled widely in Brazil and became a specialist in bromeliads. |
1864 - 1922 
Alice Northrop Alice Northrup was an American botanist, teacher and advocate of nature study for children in New York City's public schools. |
1799 - 1848 
William Oakes William Oakes was an American plant taxonomist and lawyer who became an expert on the flora of the White Mountains, New Hampshire. He died tragically in a drowning accident at the age of 49. |
|
1944 - 1989 
Timothy Plowman Timothy Plowman was a plant taxonomist and ethnobotanist, curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, who specialized in the genus Erythroxylum, the coca plant. |
1860 - 1916 
Charles Prosser Charles S. Prosser was an American geologist and paleobotanist who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He was a founding Fellow of the Geological Society of America. |
1774 - 1820 
Frederick Pursh Frederick Pursh was a German-American plant taxonomist and plant collector who was engaged by Meriwether Lewis to illustrate and describe plants collected during the Lewis and Clark expedition to the west. |
1880 - 1921 
Lincoln Riddle Lincoln Ware Riddle was an American lichenologist who in his short academic career had positions at both Wellesley College and Harvard University. He died at the age of 40 after a "long illness." |
1955 - 2018 
Rachel Saunders Rachel Saunders was a South African botanist and horticulturist (co-proprietor of Silverhill Seeds) who, along with her spouse Rod Saunders, was found murdered in South Africa in 2018. |
|
1886 - 1931 
Henry Schradieck Henry E. Schradieck was an ichthyologist who did his undergraduate work at Cornell University, earned his M.S. from University of Illinois and was a graduate student at Cornell from 1918-1920. He was President of Urbana University Junior College when he died in an auto accident in 1931. |
1869 - 1913
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Edmund Sheldon Edmund P. Sheldon was an American forester, plant collector, and expert on the genus Astragalus, on the staff of USDA (Division of Botany) and the Oregon State Board of Forestry. Sheldon mysteriously disappeared in the Nevada desert in 1913. |
1918 - 1971 
Lloyd Shinners Lloyd Shinners was a Canadian-born American botanist who was an expert on the flora of Texas. |
1910 - 1973 
Eric Sventenius E.R. Sventenius was a Swedish horticulturist, floristician and plant taxonomist who worked mainly in the Canary Islands, at the Jardin de Aclimatacion de la Orotava, Tenerife. Besides his work on the Canarian flora, his established the Jardin Botanico Canario Viera y Clavijo, Gran Canaria, in 1952, which opened in 1959. |
1656 - 1708 
Joseph Tournefort Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a French botanist who explored and collected extensively in lands along the Mediterranean and Black Seas. He is credited with being the first to conceptually distinguish between genus and species, and is likewise credited with coining the word "herbarium." |
|
1925 - 2020 
Billie Turner Billie Lee Turner was an American plant taxonomist on the faculty of University of Texas, known for his work on the flora of Texas and Mexico. |
1853 - 1907 
Lucien Underwood Lucien Underwood was an American botanist, zoologist, and educator who published extensively on ferns and hepatics, as well as various orders of invertebrates. |
1887 - 1943 
Nikolai Vavilov Nikolai Vavilov was a Russian botanist and Mendelian geneticist who developed the "law of homologous series in variation" through his studies in crop diversity and origins. He was imprisoned for his scientific views. |
1954 - 1988
IMAGE NOT YET AVAILABLE
Margaret Vodicka Peggy Vodicka was an American botanist, and spouse of hydrologist Clyde Ellis Asbury. A graduate student at the Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University, she was a teaching assistant to Professor Michael D. Whalen in the Plant Taxonomy course. She died before completing her degree. |
1950 - 1985 
Michael Whalen Michael Whalen was an American plant taxonomist and chemotaxonomist who specialized in neotropical Solanum (Solanaceae). He was a professor at the Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University. |
|
1944 - 2020 
Wayne Whistler Wayne A. Whistler was an American ethnobotanist and educator on the faculty of University of Hawaii, and an expert on the flora of tropical Pacific islands, particularly Tonga and Samoa. He died of complications from COVID-19 in April 2020. |
1936 - 2005 
Jack Wolfe Jack A. Wolfe was an American paleobotanist and paleoclimatologist employed by United States Geological Survey who had expertise in Tertiary climates of western North America. |