George Edwards FRS (3 April 1694 – 23 July 1773) was an English naturalist and ornithologist, known as the "father of British ornithology".

In his early years, he travelled extensively through mainland Europe, studying natural history, and gained a reputation for his coloured drawings of animals, especially birds.

When the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the tenth edition in 1758, he listed a binomial name for every plant and animal.

George Edwards was born on April 3, 1694, in Stratford, then a hamlet that formed part of the village of West Ham in Essex.

[5] His parents wished him to train to become a merchant, and so after leaving school he was apprenticed to John Dod in Fenchurch Street, London.

In August 1716, after seven years with Dod, he left London for Holland where he spent two months visiting most of the larger cities.

He found the city expensive and moved to the village of Guyancourt near Versailles, 21 km (13 mi) from the centre of Paris, where he boarded with a schoolmaster.

One to Châlons-en-Champagne with the son of his host and the second to Orléans and Blois dressed as a vagrant to avoid tempting robbers.

This was David Durand, a French protestant minister and a Fellow of the Royal Society who was living in London.

He likewise added a general index in French and English, which was afterwards supplied with Linnaean names by Linnaeus himself, with whom he corresponded.

The clockmaker John Harrison had been awarded the medal the previous year for his invention of a chronometer suitable for calculating longitude while at sea.

[15] Edwards included a picture of the medal on the overall title page in the first volume of his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds and an explanation in the preface.

[2] The Nuremberg engraver Johann Seligmann, realised the popular appeal of the illustrated volumes by Edwards and Mark Catesby and re-etched all 474 of the original plates.

They were published with a German text in nine volumes between 1749 and 1776 with the title Sammlung verschiedener ausländischer und seltener Vögel.

Diadophis punctatus edwardsii, a subspecies of North American snake, is named in honor of George Edwards.