Pierre Antoine Delalande
Pierre Antoine Delalande (March 27, 1787 – June 27, 1823) was a French naturalist and explorer.
Delalande was employed by the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle to collect natural history specimens. He travelled to Brazil in 1816 to collect specimens for the museum.[1]
In 1818 he began an expedition to South Africa with his nephew Jules Verreaux, who was around 12 years old at the time, to collect specimens. Delalande and Verreaux travelled and collected in South Africa for three years. On their return in 1821, they took back an astounding 13,405 specimens,[2] mostly plant material. Their collection included 288 mammals, 2205 birds, 322 reptiles, 265 fish, 3875 shellfish, and various human skulls and skeletons from a Cape Town cemetery and from the 22 April 1819 Battle of Grahamstown between the British forces under Colonel Willshire and the Xhosa under Nxele. He is honoured in the butterfly name Papilio delalandei.
Notes
- ^ Gunn, Mary and Codd, L.E. (1981). Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa, p. 128. Cape Town: A.A. Balkema. ISBN 0869611291
- ^ Farber, Paul Lawrence (2000). Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E.O. Wilson, p. 26. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801863902.
Sources
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