He was employed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, from 1833, and was professor and keeper of the vertebrate section from 1839 to 1871.

He classified a number of birds collected in southern Africa by Johan August Wahlberg.

In 1835, he developed a phylogeny for the birds based on the muscles of the hip and leg that contributed to later work by Thomas Huxley.

Sundevall was also an entomologist and arachnologist, for which (for the latter field) in 1833 he published an early catalog Conspectus Arachnidum.

Much later in 1862, he wrote a monograph proposing a universal phonetic alphabet, Om phonetiska bokstäver.