Comparative anatomy
Edward Tyson is regarded as the founder of modern comparative anatomy. He is credited with determining that whales and dolphins are, in fact, mammals. Also, he concluded that chimpanzees are more similar to humans than to monkeys because of their arms. Marco Aurelio Severino also compared various animals, including birds, in his "Zootomia democritaea", one of the first works of comparative anatomy. In the 18th and 19th century, great anatomists like George Cuvier, Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley revolutionized our understanding of the basic build and systematics of vertebrates, laying the foundation for Charles Darwin's work on evolution. An example of a 20th-century comparative anatomist is Victor Negus, who worked on the structure and evolution of the larynx. Until the advent of genetic techniques like DNA sequencing, comparative anatomy together with embryology were the primary tools for understanding phylogeny, as exemplified by the work of Alfred Romer.
Alessandra Giliani
Alessandra Giliani (1307-1326) was thought to be an Italian natural historian, best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology. However, the historical evidence for her existence is limited. Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented by  Alessandro Machiavelli (1693-1766) . whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time was so shocking that she has been edited out of history .
Giliani is believed to have been born in 1307, in San Giovanni in Persiceto, in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. The chronicle of her life holds that she died in 1326, possibly from a septic wound, at the age of 19. Celebrated as the first female anatomist of the Western World, she is reputed to have been a brilliant prosector (preparer of corpses for anatomical dissection). She is said to have worked as the surgical assistant to Mondino de' Liuzzi (d. 1326), a world-renowned professor at the medical school of the University of Bologna. (Credited with being the father of modern anatomy, de' Liuzzi published a seminal text on the subject in 1316.)