Grigore Antipa (; 27 November 1867 in Botoșani – 9 March 1944 in Bucharest) was a Romanian naturalist, zoologist, ichthyologist, ecologist, oceanologist, Darwinist biologist who studied the fauna of the Danube Delta and the Black Sea. Between 1892 and 1944 he was the director of the Bucharest Natural History Museum, which now bears his name. He is also considered to be the first person to modernize the diorama by emphasizing the three-dimensional aspect and first to use dioramas in a museum setting. He is the scientist who reorganized the Grigore Antipa National Museum of Natural History in the new building that today bears his name, designed by the architect Grigore Cerchez, built in 1906 and inaugurated by Carol I of Romania in 1908. He was elected as member of the Romanian Academy in 1910 and was also a member of several foreign academies. Grigore Antipa founded a school of hydrobiology and ichthyology in Romania. Biography Grigore Antipa spent his childhood in Botoșani, in a neighborhood inhabited by many Armenians and Jews, who taught him in foreign languages. His father was a lawyer, but he lost his parents early and was raised by his aunts in a modest environment. Thanks to his older brother, Nicolae, who was a parasitologist, he obtained a royal scholarship and studied at Jena (Germany), with the famous naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the inventor of ecology. He continued his scientific research in France and Italy. A study on the evolution of the thymus in fish dates from this period. Career Near the island of Capri (Italy), Antipa discovered a new species of fixed jellyfish, Capria sturdzii. He devoted himself to the study of the Danube and the Black Sea. Antipa founded in 1932 the Biooceanographic Institute of Constanța, with the two reservations and research stations, the one in Agigea (created by Ioan Borcea) and the one at Cape Caliacra. Grigore Antipa, with the support of kings Carol I and Ferdinand, devised a plan for the rational exploitation of fisheries in the Danube meadow and delta, and in the estuaries (the Bessarabian and Dobrogean estuaries north and south of the Danube mouths). The ecological policy of optimizing natural phenomena, called by Grigore Antipa geonomy was replaced by one to counteract them, which logically led to the acceleration of canal currents, eutrophication of stagnant areas, and the collapse of fish productivity (partially offset today through fish farming). He was