German anatomist.
Johann Christophe Andreas Mayer (8 December 1747 – 5 November 1801) was a German anatomist. Mayer worked in Berlin and later Frankfurt. In 1788, he was the first European to recognize that fingerprints were unique to each individual. His 1779 work Anatomische-Physiologische Abhandlung vom Gehirn, Rückmark, und Ursprung der Nerven mistakenly referred to the hippocampus as "hippopotamus", an error that was adopted by German anatomists in the following decades.