Carl Benjamin Klunzinger

Who is Carl Benjamin Klunzinger?

Carl Benjamin Klunzinger was a German physician and zoologist.

He studied medicine at the Universities of Tübingen and Würzburg, afterwards attending lectures on geology and zoology in Vienna and Prague. In 1862 he traveled to Cairo, where he spent eighteen months learning Arabic. Beginning in February 1864 he worked as a physician at Kosseir, a seaport on the Red Sea. Here he spent five years collecting a vast quantity of fish and other marine specimens.

From 1869 he examined his Red Sea collection at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, traveling to Frankfurt and Berlin in order to conduct zoological comparison studies. At Stuttgart he also investigated Australian fish species procured by Ferdinand von Müller, from whose collection Klunzinger described approximately fifty new species from Australia and New Zealand. In 1872 he was back in Kosseir collecting additional marine specimens, later returning to Stuttgart, where in 1884 he was appointed professor of zoology at the University of Stuttgart.