History of zoology (through 1859) |Part of a series on| This
article considers the history of zoology up to the year 1859,
when the theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed
by Charles Darwin. The history of zoology traces the study of
the animal kingdom from ancient to modern times. Although the
concept of zoology as a single coherent field arose much later,
the zoological sciences emerged from natural history reaching
back to the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient Greco-
Roman world. This ancient work was further developed in the
Middle Ages by Muslim physicians and scholars such as Albertus
Magnus. During the European Renaissance and early modern period,
zoological thought was revolutionized in Europe by a renewed
interest in empiricism and the discovery of many novel
organisms. Prominent in this movement were Vesalius and William
Harvey, who used experimentation and careful observation in
physiology, and naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus and Buffon who
began to classify the diversity o