Carl Jakob Sundevall

Who was Carl Jakob Sundevall?

Carl Jakob Sundevall was a Swedish zoologist. Sundevall studied at Lund University, where he became a Ph.D. in 1823. After traveling to East Asia, he studied medicine, graduating as Doctor of Medicine in 1830.

He was employed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm from 1833, and was professor and keeper of the vertebrate section from 1839 to 1871. He wrote Svenska Foglarna which described 238 species of birds observed in Sweden. He classified a number of birds collected in southern Africa by Johan August Wahlberg. In 1835, he developed a phylogeny for the birds based on the muscles of the hip and leg that contributed to later work by Thomas Huxley. He then went on to examine the arrangement of the deep plantar tendons in the bird's foot. This latter information is still used by avian taxonomists. Sundevall was also an entomologist and arachnologist and in 1862 wrote a monograph proposing a universal phonetic alphabet, Om phonetiska bokstäver.