Carl Eduard Hellmayr

After his studies he worked in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Tring (England), and Chicago.

He spent the years 1905–1908 studying Baron Rothschild's private collection of natural history specimens at Tring, near London.

His books included 13 of the 15 volumes of the Catalogue of Birds of the Americas (1918–1949), a work initiated by Hellmayr's predecessor, Charles B. Cory.

After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, he was arrested and briefly jailed for reasons that are not fully known but probably related to his unsympathetic views toward the Nazi Party (Hellmayr did not make political statements in public, but his interest – as an amateur historian – in the French Revolution shows that he was more than casually interested in such topics).

Historian François Vuilleumier writes that "Hellmayr's pivotal role was first and foremost to bring order to [the] nomenclatural chaos" of his day that had resulted in erroneous citations and hindered analysis of species and genera.