Philip Lutley Sclater FRS FRGS FZS FLS (4 November 1829 – 27 June 1913) was an English lawyer and zoologist.

In 1856 he travelled to America and visited Lake Superior and the upper St. Croix River, canoeing down it to the Mississippi.

In Philadelphia he met Spencer Baird, John Cassin and Joseph Leidy at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

In 1858, Sclater published a paper in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, setting up six zoological regions which he called the Palaearctic, Aethiopian, Indian, Australasian, Nearctic, and Neotropical.

At around the same time the museum was augmented by the collections of Gould, Salvin and Godman, Hume, and others to become the largest in the world.

Their third son, Captain Guy Lutley Sclater, died on 26 November 1914, aged 45, in the accidental explosion that sank HMS Bulwark.

[9] Although eclipsed by his contemporaries (like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace), Sclater may be considered as a precursor of biogeography and even pattern cladistics.