Jean Albert Gaudry French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 geologist

Geologist

A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...

 and palaeontologist, was born at St Germain-en-Laye, and was educated at the college Stanislas.

At the age of twenty-five he made explorations in Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

 and Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

, residing in the latter country from 1855 to 1860. He then investigated the rich deposit of fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 vertebrata at Pikermi and brought to light a remarkable mammal

Mammal

Mammals are members of a class of air-breathing vertebrate animals characterised by the possession of endothermy, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands functional in mothers with young...

ian fauna, Miocene

Miocene

The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...

 in age, and intermediate in its forms between European, Asiatic and African types. He also published an account of the geology of the island of Cyprus (Mém. Soc. Géol. de France, 1862).

In 1853, while still in Cyprus, he was appointed assistant to A d'Orbigny, who was the first to hold the chair of palaeontology in the museum of natural history at Paris. In 1872 he succeeded to this important post; in 1882 he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences; and in 1900 he presided over the meetings of the eighth International Congress of Geology then held in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2...

 in 1900.

He is distinguished for his researches on fossil mammalia, and for the support which his studies have rendered to the theory of evolution.

Publications

• Animaux fossiles et géologie de l'Attique (2 vols., 1862-1867)
• Cours de paléontologie (1873)
• Animaux fossiles de Mont Leboron (1873)
• Les Enchainements du monde animal dans les termes géologiques (Mammifères Tertiaires, 1878 ; Fossiles primaires, 1883; Fossiles secondaires, 1890)
• Essai de paléontologie philosophique (1896)

Brief memoir with portrait in Geol. Mag. (1903), p. 49.
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