Abstract
Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny, the prodigious French naturalist and paleontologist of the first half of the 19th Century, published over three hundred works on natural history, geology, anthropology, linguistics, and the taxonomy and paleontology of every major phylum of animals, many plants, and a single protist group, the Foraminifera (Barta-Calmus 2002). His work on foraminifera was mostly descriptive, but he first named the group (although in the French vernacular so he is not credited with the systematic use of the name), used new techniques of explanation, amassed a huge collection of specimens and samples, and published seven major contributions on them, which included descriptions of nearly 1500 new species. d’Orbigny is well known to all foraminiferal workers today and in the past. Indeed, as the Englishman Edward Heron-Allen first noted in 1917, d’Orbigny established the field of micropaleontology with his descriptions and stratigraphic documentation of foraminifera. Later, the Frenchwoman Yolande Le Calvez (1974) called d’Orbigny “the father of micropaleontology” while the American J. J. Galloway (1933) considered d’Orbigny the “greatest student of foraminifera” of all time. A review of d’Orbigny’s more than 300 titles suggests that he could be considered the “father”, or at least the “uncle”, of many fields, including biostratigraphy, invertebrate paleontology, and French paleontology, and he was recognized as the “greatest” documenter ever of many groups of organisms (ammonites, bivalves, gastropods, rudists, and many others). Darwin, for example, called d’Orbigny’s 9-volume Voyage dans l’Amerique meridionale “one of the monuments of the science of the 19th century” (Venec-Peyre, 2002). His work and collections are still used and cited by botanists, zoologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, and …
Published Version
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