Johann Wilhelm Meigen - Achievements

Achievements

Meigen is universally recognized as the "father" of Dipterology. Aside from his beautifully executed drawings Meigen's great achievement was to employ combinations of morphological characters to work out his scientific classification. This was in contrast to his Swedish contemporary Carl Frederick Fallén who had used mouthpart characters alone. Thus he had come to the same conclusion as Pierre André Latreille, Moses Harris and Louis Jurine though independently and an eclectic methodology was firmly established.

Meigen described a vast number of European Diptera (mostly valid) and his work laid the foundations of all later work on this important insect group.

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