Her name was Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–
1717), and she was a scientist who spent decades studying the flora and fauna of South America and illustrating them. It was her contributions to the scientific world that helped shape the modern concept of naturalism and disprove the theory of spontaneous generation. Her discoveries revealed the existence of many animals to Europe, including leafcutter ants, army ants, and tarantulas (specifically of the genus Avicularia).
I found many of these
large black spiders on the guava trees. They live in a
round nest like the cocoon of the caterpillar depicted
on the following plate; they do not spin long threads
as some travelers would have us believe.
This image was highly controversial, and many Europeans found the notion that a spider could eat a bird to be impossible. Merian was accused of “willful falsehoods”, and during the Victorian era she was often discredited due to being a woman. She was only vindicated when Henry Walter Bates, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, published a book containing a similar account of an Avicularia (referred to as Mygale) feeding on a finch.
