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Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe ran the observatory of Uraniborg on the island of Hven from 1576 for over twenty years, measuring the positions of stars and planets night after night with large instruments and a staff of assistants. Continuity and precision were the point: only a long, consistent record of Mars could show its true path. After his death his assistant Johannes Kepler used the data to find the laws of planetary motion.
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Robert Marsham
Robert Marsham, a Norfolk landowner, began recording his "Indications of Spring" in 1736: the first leafing of trees, the first song of birds, frogs croaking. He kept going for over sixty years, and his descendants continued the record until 1958. The Marsham series is now one of the longest phenological records in Britain and is used by scientists to show how spring has moved earlier as the climate warms.
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Caroline Herschel
Born
Caroline Herschel swept the night sky for years from the 1780s, finding eight comets and many nebulae, while keeping the records for her brother William's survey of the heavens. After his death she returned to Hanover and, in her seventies, completed a catalogue of the nebulae and star clusters they had found, which her nephew John Herschel extended. The Royal Astronomical Society gave her its gold medal in 1828.
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Heinrich Schwabe
Born
Heinrich Schwabe, a pharmacist in Dessau, began watching the Sun daily in 1826 hoping to find a planet inside Mercury's orbit. He never found it, but after seventeen years of counting sunspots he reported in 1843 that their number rises and falls over about ten years. The sunspot cycle was taken up by Rudolf Wolf in Zurich, whose counting series still continues as the international sunspot number.
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John Bennet Lawes
John Bennet Lawes founded Rothamsted on his Hertfordshire estate and in 1843 began field experiments with the chemist Joseph Henry Gilbert, who worked beside him for nearly sixty years. The Broadbalk wheat experiment has been sown with the same fertiliser treatments almost every year since, and Lawes left money to keep it going. Its unbroken record, with stored soil and crop samples, still answers questions about soil, pollution and climate.
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Wilson Bentley
Born
Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Jericho, Vermont, took the first photograph of a single snowflake in 1885 using a microscope fitted to a bellows camera, and kept photographing them every winter for the rest of his life, over 5,000 in all. He also recorded weather and raindrop sizes. His long series supported the idea that no two snowflakes are alike, and his collection is held by the Jericho Historical Society and the Buffalo Museum of Science.
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Annie S. D. Maunder
Annie Maunder joined the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as a "lady computer" in 1891 and, with her husband Walter Maunder, spent decades photographing and charting sunspots. Their butterfly diagram of 1904 showed how sunspots drift towards the solar equator through each cycle. Their study of old records highlighted the long gap in sunspots in the late seventeenth century now called the Maunder Minimum.
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Charles David Keeling
Born
Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in Hawaii in 1958 for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, insisting on precise, continuous calibration when funders doubted the value of repeating the same measurement. Within a few years the record showed both the seasonal breathing of plants and a steady rise. Since his death in 2005 his son Ralph Keeling has continued the Scripps record, alongside parallel measurements by the US agency NOAA.
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Jane Goodall
Born
Jane Goodall began watching chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960, sponsored by Louis Leakey, and the study has run ever since, the longest continuous study of wild chimpanzees. Its length revealed things a short study could not: tool use passed down families, a four-year war between communities and the life histories of individuals. Tanzanian field assistants have kept daily records for decades, and the work continues after her death in October 2025.
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Gene Likens
Born
Gene Likens co-founded the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire's White Mountains in 1963 with F. Herbert Bormann and others, measuring the chemistry of rain and stream water from small forested valleys week after week. The long record revealed acid rain in North America in the early 1970s and later showed how slowly forests recover even after pollution laws. The study continues under the US Forest Service and partner universities.
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Dian Fossey
Born
Dian Fossey founded the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda's Virunga mountains in 1967 and spent eighteen years habituating and recording mountain gorilla groups, showing their family life and the toll of poaching. She was murdered at her camp in 1985. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has kept daily monitoring going ever since, largely through Rwandan trackers and scientists, making it one of the longest-running studies of any wild ape.
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Jeanne Altmann
Jeanne Altmann and her husband Stuart Altmann began the Amboseli Baboon Research Project in Kenya in 1971. Her 1974 paper on sampling methods for observing behaviour, which set out ways to avoid recording only the most noticeable animals, became one of the most cited in the field. The project's decades of individual life histories, kept by Kenyan field teams and later directors Susan Alberts and Elizabeth Archie, show how early adversity affects lifespan.
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Biruté Galdikas
Born
Biruté Galdikas arrived in Indonesian Borneo in 1971, the third of Louis Leakey's primate researchers alongside Goodall and Fossey, and set up Camp Leakey in what became Tanjung Puting National Park. Her decades of observation showed that orangutans breed only about every eight years, which makes them especially vulnerable. She led the study and Orangutan Foundation International until her death in March 2026.
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Cynthia Moss
Born
Cynthia Moss began the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya in 1972 with Harvey Croze, identifying every elephant in the population by its ears and tusks. Following the same families for over fifty years showed the central role of old matriarchs in herd survival and how long elephants remember. Her Kenyan colleagues, including Norah Njiraini and Katito Sayialel, have recorded the herds for decades alongside her.
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Tim Clutton-Brock
Born
Tim Clutton-Brock joined the study of red deer on the Isle of Rum in 1972 and led it for decades, following every animal in one part of the island from birth to death; he later founded a long-term study of meerkats in the Kalahari. These lifetime records showed how mothers' condition and competition among males shape survival and breeding. The Rum study continues with colleagues including Josephine Pemberton and Loeske Kruuk.
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Craig Packer
Craig Packer took over the Serengeti Lion Project in Tanzania in 1978, a study begun by George Schaller in 1966, and with Anne Pusey and many field assistants kept track of dozens of prides for over four decades. The long record showed why lions live in groups, how outbreaks of canine distemper and drought interact, and how lion numbers respond to people living nearby.
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Richard Lenski
Born
Richard Lenski started twelve flasks of the same E. coli bacteria in 1988 and has transferred them to fresh medium almost every day since, freezing samples every 500 generations as a living fossil record. After about 31,500 generations one population evolved the ability to feed on citrate, and the frozen samples let his student Zachary Blount replay its history. Now past 80,000 generations, the experiment has moved to Jeffrey Barrick's laboratory in Texas.
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