Léon Croizat

Léon Camille Marius Croizat (16 July 1894 – 30 November 1982) was a French-Italian scholar and botanist who developed an orthogenetic synthesis of the evolution of biological form over space, in time, which he called panbiogeography.

[1] Despite his great aptitude for the natural sciences, Leon studied and received a degree in law from the University of Turin.

During the 1930s, Croizat found a job identifying plants as part of a topographic inventory performed in the public parks of New York City.

When Merrill was appointed director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in 1936, he hired Leon as a technical assistant (in 1937.

)[1] Croizat became a prolific student and publisher, studying important aspects of the distribution and evolution of biological species.

In 1976 they took over as first directors of the “Jardin Botanico Xerofito” in Coro, a city approximately 400 kilometres West of Caracas.

Orthogenesis is a term used by Croizat, in his words "... in a pure mechanistic sense",[8] which refers to the fact that a variation in form is limited and constrained.

consider Croizat as one of the most original thinkers of modern comparative biology, whose contributions provided the foundation of a new synthesis between earth and life sciences.