Edgar Leopold Layard CMG, FZS, MBOU (23 July 1824 – 1 January 1900) was a British naturalist mainly interested in ornithology. Born in Florence, Italy, to a family of Huguenot descent, he was the sixth son of Henry Peter John Layard of the Ceylon Civil Service (the son of Charles Peter Layard, dean of Bristol, and grandson of Daniel Peter Layard, the physician) with his wife Marianne, a daughter of Nathaniel Austen, banker, of Ramsgate. Through h...
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Edgar Leopold Layard CMG, FZS, MBOU (23 July 1824 – 1 January 1900) was a British naturalist mainly interested in ornithology. Born in Florence, Italy, to a family of Huguenot descent, he was the sixth son of Henry Peter John Layard of the Ceylon Civil Service (the son of Charles Peter Layard, dean of Bristol, and grandson of Daniel Peter Layard, the physician) with his wife Marianne, a daughter of Nathaniel Austen, banker, of Ramsgate. Through her, he was partly of Spanish descent. His uncle was Benjamin Austen, a London solicitor and close friend of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1820s and 1830s. He was the brother of the archaeologist and politician Sir Austen Henry Layard.
Layard spent ten years in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he studied the local fauna with Robert Templeton (1802–1892). In 1854, he went to the Cape Colony as a civil servant working in the service of the governor George Edward Grey (1812–1898). In 1855, during his spare time, Layard was a curator in the South African...
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