Arend Friedrich August Wiegmann

Who was Arend Friedrich August Wiegmann?

Arend Friedrich August Wiegmann was a German zoologist and herpetologist born in Braunschweig.

He studied medicine and philology at the University of Leipzig, and afterwards was an assistant to Martin Lichtenstein in Berlin. In 1828 he became a professor at Cologne, and two years later was an extraordinary professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Weigmann specialized in the study of herpetology and mammalogy. In 1835, he founded, together with other scholars, the zoological periodical Archiv für Naturgeschichte, also known as "Wiegmann's Archive". With Johann Friedrich Ruthe he wrote an important textbook of zoology called Handbuch der Zoologie, and in 1834 Wiegmann published Herpetologia Mexicana, a monograph on the reptiles of Mexico.

In 1841 he died of tuberculosis at the age of 38 in Berlin.

⁕Note: He is not to be confused with his father Arend Friedrich Wiegmann, a German researcher in botany.