In a world where words like "entomologist" and "ecologist" had not yet been coined, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) managed to be both. She was trained as a painter of flowers but was really more interested in the bugs on the flowers. Her adventures took her from her native Germany to Holland, across the Atlantic to Surinam, and back, where her paintings of wildlife were admired by scientists across Europe and contributed to Carl Linnaeus's system of scientific nomenclature.
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