Robert Wiedersheim

Robert Ernst Eduard Wiedersheim (21 April 1848 – 12 July 1923) was a German anatomist who is famous for publishing a list of 86 "vestigial organs" in his book The Structure of Man: An Index to His Past History.

In 1872 Wiedersheim finished a doctoral thesis on the finer structural relations of the glands in the gizzard of birds, a subject suggested to him by Carl Hasse while in Würzburg.

[3] At Freiburg Wiedersheim took part in a lengthy ongoing collaboration with Alexander Ecker and Ernst Gaupp to produce a comprehensive, illustrated atlas of anatomy for the European edible frog Rana esculenta.

The structure of Man: An Index to His Past History deals with various anatomical elements of the human body and attempts to frame them in an evolutionary context with other vertebrates.

Wiedersheim himself suggests in the introduction that this work is in the same vein as Thomas Huxley's earlier Evidence as to man's place in nature.

Thanks to a high degree of interest and correspondence regarding the work Wiedersheim decided to publish a revised and expanded version.

"[2] He picked up on Darwin's concept of "rudimentary" organs such as listed in The Descent of Man: the muscles of the ear, wisdom teeth, the appendix, the coccyx (tail bone), body hair, and the semilunar fold in the corner of the eye.

The zoologist Horatio Newman said in a written statement read into evidence in the Scopes Trial that "There are, according to Wiedersheim, no less than 180 vestigial structures in the human body, sufficient to make of a man a veritable walking museum of antiquities.