John Edmonstone - Taxidermist

John Edmonstone was a freed slave who went on to teach Charles Darwin. Edmonstone was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in the late 1700s. His slave master Charles Edmonstone brought him to Edinburgh, Scotland in the early 1800s. Whist in Scotland Edmonstone gained his freedom, he learned taxidermy (how to preserve animal skins) and went on to educate others as well as open his own taxidermy workshop and business.

Edmonstone was a lecturer he taught taxidermy to natural science students from the University of Edinburgh - teaching them how to preserve birds and animals. One of his students was the young Charles Darwin who was a teenager at the time. Edmonstone taught Darwin the basics of taxidermy during his medical studies at Edinburgh in the 1820s. The ability to preserve specimens as soon as possible became crucial when Darwin was travelling and voyaging on the ship HMS Beagle.

The man who taught Charles Darwin!

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