John Samuel Budgett

Who was John Samuel Budgett?

John Samuel Budgett was a British zoologist and embryologist. He spent most of his short career on the genus Polypterus. This is found in the lakes, river margins, swamps, and floodplains of tropical central and western Africa and the Nile River system. Zoologists at the time wondered whether it was a bony fish, a cartilaginous fish, a lungfish or a primitive amphibian. Forty years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, zoologists were seeking to map the history of species and this primitive animal was a key part of the map. To find its place there, it was necessary to observe juvenile Polypterus in the wild. It took Budgett four African expeditions but in the end he succeeded in doing so.

However, the long periods spent in swampy, mosquito-ridden places left him debilitated with malaria and he died of Blackwater Fever shortly after his return to England. This happened on the very day that he was supposed to deliver a lecture on his work to the Zoological Society of London. He didn’t even have time to write a report. However he did leave a full set of drawings and specimens.