Harvey Teper Woodman was born on September 12, 1827, in Corinth, Maine.

He was a naturalist. He left home at the age of ten and went to Boston, where he worked in the drugstore and studied chemistry and natural history. He then moved to St. Louis, and in 1849, to New York City. For thirteen years, he studied the coral reefs of Florida and investigated the Gulf Stream and currents at Dry Tortugas for the government. For more than forty years, he collected shells, corals, and fossils and helped build the collections of museums of the natural history of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and other universities and private collectors. Woodman was also one of the experts of the Smithsonian Institution. The collections in the Museum of Natural History at Princeton and in New York are named after him. Woodman gained international fame by publishing his theory that America populated Europe and not vice versa. He based it on the geological formation, the fossils, and prehistoric bones found on the American continent. In 1869, Woodman founded the Iowa Institute of Science and Art and served as its vice-president. He was an intimate friend of Presidents Lincoln and Grant.

In 1852, he married Catherine Charlotte Rawson (1829–1901). He died on May 22, 1903, in Mt. Vernon, New York.