Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda

Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda (24 October 1788, in Delft – 2 September 1867, in Haarlem) was a Dutch biologist and geologist.

In this period he benefitted from the newly peaceful conditions in Europe by visiting places of scientific interest to him, e.g. in Germany.

In 1839 he moved to Haarlem where he was appointed secretary of the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (Hollandic Society of the Sciences) — in which capacity he launched over 400 essay competitions — and head of both the Palaeontological & Mineralogical and the Physics Cabinet of the Teylers Museum.

His successor as curator of geology, paleontology and mineralogy at Teylers Museum was Tiberius Cornelis Winkler, who had produced the first Dutch translation of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1860.

Van Breda also had an extensive personal geological and paleontological collection, of about 1900 pieces, which in 1871 was sold to the University of Cambridge and the British Museum of Natural History; in 1883 one of the fossils was named in honour of Van Breda: Megalosaurus bredai, later made the type species of the dinosaur Betasuchus.