Thomas Jeffery Parker

Thomas Jeffery Parker F.R.S. (17 October 1850 – 7 November 1897) was a zoologist who worked in New Zealand.

Biography Parker was born at 124 Tachbrook Street in London on 17 October 1850 He studied at Clarendon House School and graduated from the University of London in 1868. Huxley's work on crayfish kindled in Parker an interest in crustaceans, and he went on to study the marine "crayfish" (spiny lobsters) of New Zealand, together with his student Josephine Gordon Rich, who later married William Aitcheson Haswell.

On 23 December 1874, Thomas Jeffery Parker married Charlotte Elizabeth Rossell in Bramley, Yorkshire. succeeding Frederick Hutton. Fin whale skeleton, Otago Museum, as acquired and displayed by T.J. Parker

Parker sent a display of a series of skulls to the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880, which was later reused in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin. The display used coloured wires and painted bones to show the evolution of the vertebrate skull. In 1883, Parker obtained a fin whale specimen from Captain William Jackson Barry, who had himself bought and exhibited it in Nelson.

In his later years, Parker suffered from diabetes, and he died on 7 November 1897 at Warrington. After his death, Parker was succeeded at the University of Otago by William Blaxland Benham. Despite living in different countries, Parker wrote an introductory textbook on zoology together with William Aitcheson Haswell, which continued to be used into the 1960s.

Taxon named in his honor The Oarfish Agrostichthys parkeri (Benham, 1904) was named after him.