Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville

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Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville
Born(1777-09-12)12 September 1777
Died1 May 1850(1850-05-01) (aged 72)
Known forTaxonomic authority on zoological species
AwardsMember of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia and of the French Academy of Sciences; foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsCollège de France
French Academy of Sciences
Author abbrev. (zoology)Blainville

Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (French:

anatomist
.

Life

Blainville was born at

Dieppe. As a young man he went to Paris to study art, but ultimately devoted himself to natural history. He attracted the attention of Georges Cuvier, for whom he occasionally substituted as lecturer at the Collège de France and at the Athenaeum Club, London. In 1812 he was aided by Cuvier in acquiring the position of assistant professor of anatomy and zoology in the Faculty of Sciences at Paris. Eventually, relations between the two men soured, a situation that ended in open enmity.[1]

In 1819, Blainville was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.[2] In 1825 he was admitted a member of the French Academy of Sciences; and in 1830 he was appointed to succeed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the chair of natural history at the museum. Two years later, on the death of Cuvier, he obtained the chair of comparative anatomy, of which he proved himself a worthy successor to his former teacher.[1] In 1837, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. On May 1, 1850, he died from an attack of apoplexy in a railway carriage at the Embarcadère du Havre (current Gare Saint-Lazare) in Paris.[3]

He was the

taxonomic authority of numerous zoological species, extinct and extant; including the eponymous Blainville's beaked whale
, Mesoplodon densirostris.

In the field of

Reptilia, and then (1816) developed a unique arrangement in regards to sub-groupings, using organs of generation as primary criteria.[4][5] He described several new species of reptiles.[6]

Blainville rejected evolution. He was a critic of Lamarck's evolutionary ideas but similar to Lamarck proposed a great chain of being.[7][8]

First mention of the word palæontologie, as coined in January 1822 by Blainville in his Journal de physique.

It was in 1822 that he coined the term paleontology.

Taxon named in his honor

Blainville is commemorated in the scientific names of several species, such as the

Selected writings

Taxon described by him

References

  1. ^ a b Chisholm 1911.
  2. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-04-05.
  3. ^ Du jardin au Muséum en 516 biographies / Philippe Jaussaud; Edouard-Raoul Brygoo .- Paris  : Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, 2004 .- pp. 169-170 Archived 2014-02-21 at the Wayback Machine (Archives)
  4. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed. (1878) Amphibia
  5. ^ Google Books Report of the Annual Meeting, Volume 4, Part 1835 by British Association for the Advancement of Science. Meeting
  6. ^ "Blainville". The Reptile Database. www.reptile-database.org.
  7. ^ Appel, Toby A. (1980). Henri De Blainville and the Animal Series: A Nineteenth-Century Chain of Being. Journal of the History of Biology 13 (2): 291-319.
  8. "As early as 1816 Henri de Blainville, professor of zoology at the faculty of sciences, had adopted Lamarck's animal series, with its spontaneously generated base (although without accepting his transformism)"
  9. . ("Blainville", p. 26).
  10. ^ Christopher Scharpf & Kenneth J. Lazara (22 September 2018). "Order SYNGNATHIFORMES: Families AULOSTOMIDAE, CENTRISCIDAE, FISTULARIIDAE, SOLENOSTOMIDAE and SYNGNATHIDAE". The ETYFish Project Fish Name Etymology Database. Christopher Scharpf and Kenneth J. Lazara. Retrieved 13 March 2023.

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