British printer and naturalist who became an important botanist in the United States and a pioneer of American palaeontology. He travelled to Philadelphia (1808) where he was persuaded by Professor B.S. Barton to work on the American flora. Nuttall joined a number of scientific expeditions (1811-1834) to the Mississippi and Missouri valleys and was one of the first botanists to travel overland to the Pacific coast; he also visited the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1836. Nuttall was appointed curator (of the botanic garden in Harvard (1822-1834), became a professor (1823) and something of a scientific celebrity. Tales of his single-minded pursuit of natural history, oblivious to personal risk, fuelled his reputation as an eccentric. Fellow travellers had commented on his approach to the dangers of travelling in Indian country, his rifle blocked with dirt and stones from using it to dig up plants.

Almost the whole of his scientific work was done in the United States, and most of his published works appeared there. He returned to England in 1842 having inherited a property with a condition that he spend time living there. A brief return to the United States (1847-1848) was made to complete his project on The North American Sylva. The genus Nuttallia Raf. in the Loasaceae was named in his honour, and the same name has been used several times as a later homonym. Nuttallanthus D.A. Sutton is based on material in the Scrophulariaceae that Nuttall considered to be a new genus on his herbarium labels, but was included in Linaria by George Bentham. Nuttall's early collections (before 1818) are at PH but his main herbarium, some 5,750 specimens including a great many types, was purchased by BM in 1860.