John Anderson (zoologist)

John Anderson FRSE FRS FRGS FZS FLS FRPSE FSA (4 October 1833 – 15 August 1900) was a Scottish anatomist and zoologist who worked in India as the curator of the Indian Museum.

He was born in Edinburgh, the second son of Thomas Anderson who worked in the National Bank of Scotland and his wife Jane Cleghorn. John took an interest in natural history at an early age as did his brother Thomas Anderson, who worked at the Royal Botanic Garden in Calcutta from 1861 to 1863. He went to school at George Square Academy and Hill Street Institution before joining work at the Bank of Scotland. He left to study medicine and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1861. He studied anatomy under John Goodsir and became an MD in 1862 with a gold medal for his thesis in zoology. He was also associated with the founding of the Royal Physical Society which grew out of the Wernerian Society over which he presided. He was appointed to the chair of natural history in the Free Church college in Edinburgh and worked for the next two years. During this period he studied marine organisms based on dredging off the coast of Scotland and published notes in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History.

Anderson moved to India in 1864 to take up the position as the first curator of the Indian Museum at Calcutta in 1865. He catalogued the mammal and archaeological collections. He held the position of curator until 1887, when he was succeeded by James Wood-Mason and made superintendent of the museum. He made several collection expeditions to China and Burma. In 1867 he accompanied Colonel Edward Bosc Sladen as a naturalist on an expedition to Upper Burma and Yunnan. This expedition allowed him to collect the Irrawaddy dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris and compared with Orcaella fluminalis and the Gangetic dolphin, Plantanista gangetica. In 1875-6 he travelled to the same area under Colonel Horace Browne. This was cut short due to the murder of the consular officer Augustus Raymond Margary. Anderson made a third expedition for the Indian Museum in 1881–2 to the Mergui archipelago, Burma.

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