Born in Eskrigg, Lancs. son of John Penny and has been called the first significant English entomologist. Studied as a teenager at Queen's College, Cambridge in 1546, moving to Trinity in 1550 where he graduated in 1551, became a Fellow in 1553 and then senior bursar. He was ordained and also acquired medical qualifications although he was barred from practising (see web entry on British History Online). He died in Gressingham, Lancs, where he lived for much of his life.
His involvement with Coleoptera specifically is not known although illustrations of beetles appear in Thomas Moffet's Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum, 1634, which includes Penny's name in conjunction with Edward Wooton and Conrad Gesner, the volume for which Penny is known to have provided many of the illustrations included as wood cuts in the final version (Potts, W.T.W and Fear, L., 'Thomas Penny, the first English Entomologist' in Contrebis, Journal of the Lancaster Archaeological and Historical Society, 25, 2000). D.E.Allen, Books and Naturalists, illustrates the titlepage intended by Moffet which includes a wood cut portrait of Penny, and discusses the production of the book noting that as published it was 'a sorry relic of what Penny could have been expected to pass on for the benefit of his successors had his death not intervened'. Several of the descriptions in the book in combination with his wood cuts have enabled almost 20 different UK butterflies to be identified.
John Whittaker 'Thomas Penny - a pioneering English entomologist' in Antenna, Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society, 45, 2021, 21-22, notes that Penny kept some insects in captivity to study life cycles and that he travelled extensively visiting Majorca, Germany, France and Switzerland. It was in the last that he met Conrad Gesner whose collection of insects he studied. The insect section of Gesner's Historiae Animalium (1551-1587) was not published unti 22 years after Gesner's death prompting speculation that Penny may have been involved. Whittaker also notes that Penny was recognised internationally as an authority on insects, and specimens were sent to him from the New World as well as many parts of the Old World.
(MD 4/21)