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Natural history

For other uses, see Natural history (disambiguation).
"Naturalist" redirects here. For other uses, see Naturalist (disambiguation).

Black and white tables of natural history, from Ephraim Chambers's 1728 Cyclopaedia.

Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is called a naturalist or natural historian.

Natural history encompasses scientific research but is not limited to it.[1] It involves the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms,[2] so while it dates from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and the mediaeval Arabic world, through to European Renaissance naturalists working in near isolation, today's natural history is a cross-discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences; e.g., geobiology has a strong multidisciplinary nature.

  1. ^ With "natural history" articles more often published today in science magazines than in academic journals.Natural History WordNet Search, princeton.edu Archived 2012-03-03 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ^ Brown, Lesley (1993), The New shorter Oxford English dictionary on historical principles, Oxford [Eng.]: Clarendon, ISBN 0-19-861271-0