Hans Friedrich Gadow
Hans Friedrich Gadow (8 March 1855 – 16 May 1928) was a German-born ornithologist who worked in Britain. His work on the classification of birds based on anatomical and morphological characters was influential and made use of by Alexander Wetmore in his classification of North American birds. Gadow was born in Stary Kraków (Pomerania), the son of an inspector of the Prussian royal forests. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Jena and Heidelberg. At Jena he studied under Ernst Haeckel and at Heidelberg University under the anatomist Karl Gegenbaur. After graduation he travelled to the Natural History Museum in London in 1880 at the request of Albert Günther, to work on the museum's Catalogue of Birds. Gadow also established the first new sequence of bird orders and families that departed from earlier works in being based on phylogenetic principles based on a comparison of anatomical and morphological features and made use of the studies made by Max Fürbringer. This sequence was continued with modification by Alexander Wetmore and James L. Peters and followed from the 1930s to the 1960s. Gadow prepared Volume VIII on the titmice, shrikes and nuthatches, and Volume IX on the sunbirds and honeyeaters. In 1884