Researching Arend Wiegmann

He studied medicine and philology at the University of Leipzig, and afterwards was an assistant to Martin Lichtenstein (1780–1857) in Berlin. In 1828 he became a professor at Cologne, and two years later was an extraordinary professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Wiegmann specialized in the study of herpetology and mammalogy. In 1835, he founded, together with other scholars, the zoological periodical Archiv für Naturgeschichte, also known as "Wiegmann's Archive". With Johann Friedrich Ruthe (1788–1859) he wrote an important textbook of zoology called Handbuch der Zoologie, and in 1834 Wiegmann published Herpetologia Mexicana, a monograph on the reptiles of Mexico.

In 1841 he died of tuberculosis at the age of 38 in Berlin.

His father Arend Friedrich Wiegmann (1771–1853) a German researcher in botany.

Originally an apprentice pharmacist to his uncle in Braunschweig, he spent the following years working in several pharmacies in Germany and Switzerland. Following the death of his uncle in 1796, he inherited the Braunschweig pharmacy, serving as its manager until 1820. In 1821 he became a lecturer of natural sciences at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig, later receiving the title of professor (1832).

In 1839 he published a manual on phytopathology called Die Krankheiten und krankhaften Missbildungen der Gewachse. He was the author of a treatise involving the origins, formation and nature of peat, titled Über die Entstehung, Bildung und das Wesen des Torfes. In 1842 he and L. Polstorff wrote on plant constituents that are not organic: Ũber die anorganischen Bestandteiele der Pflanzen.

In 1832, Franz Julius Ferdinand Meyen named the plant genus Wiegmannia in his son's honor.