Giuseppe Scortecci

Vocation

Traits

Italian herpetologist, mainly interested in the herpetofauna of deserts and especially lizards. He made numerous explorations in the Sahara, in Somalia and in Ethiopia, and he took advantage of the expansion of Italy by colonization. He published fifty works on herpetology, including several books on desert fauna. He studied taxonomy, biogeography, ecology and physiology (such as the sensory system of agamid lizards and iguanids). After the First World War, Scortecci obtained a PhD in Natural History at the University of Florence (1921) and then joined the Institute of Comparative Anatomy. He then became a conservator of lower vertebrates at the city's natural history museum and became a professor of zoology in 1942 at the University of Genoa. Scortecci died on 18 October 1973 in Milan. Link to Wikipedia biography (French)