Enrico Hillyer Giglioli (13 June 1845 – 16 December 1909) was an Italian zoologist and anthropologist.
Giglioli was born in London and first studied there. He obtained a degree in science at the University of Pisa in 1864 and started to teach zoology in Florence in 1869. Marine vertebrates, and invertebrates, were his academic interest but he was a noted amateur ornithologist and photographer.
Giglioli was director of the Royal Zoological MuseuminFlorence, Italy. He wrote up the zoology of the voyage of the corvette Magenta on which he had taken over from Filippo de Filippi. Professor De Filippi died in Hong Kong in 1867. He was also involved in the activities of the Florence School of Anthropology and through this developed an interest in ethnography. In 1901, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.[1]
In 1870 he reported seeing a new species of whale (unofficially called Giglioli's Whale) 1,200 miles (1,900 km) off the coast of Chile – 60 feet (18 m) long with two dorsal fins – observed by Giglioli from Magenta, a warship of the Italian Royal Navy.[2] The Rorqual is the only similarly configured whale in the fossil record. A similar whale was seen a year later off the coast of Scotland. The two dorsal fins were said to be over six feet high, with a large pair of flippers. It was provisionally named Anphiptera Pacifica, and is an unrecognized species of, not having been confirmed by enough sightings to be recognized as a species.[citation needed] The voyage of the "Magenta" was sponsored by the Government of Italy in the 19th century.[3]
He also reported a stranding of a Cuvier's beaked whale in the Mediterranean Sea,[4] as well as orcas and fin whales in the Mediterranean.[5][6]
Giglioli conducted a detailed study of the chimpanzee skulls which his friend Georg August Schweinfurth collected in the region of today's southern Sudan[specify]. He named the species Troglodytes schweinfurthii.
After his death, Giglioli's collection, together with his extensive archaeological and ethnological library (from 1885 Giglioli concentrated on his ethnographic collection exchanging specimens with the Smithsonian Institution and fellow naturalists, notably Edward Pierson Ramsay), went to the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography where they are now conserved. The photographic archive includes work by John K. Hillers, Timothy H. O'Sullivan and Charles Milton Bell photos as well as his own.
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