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Alfred Duvaucel
Alfred Duvaucel (1793, Évreux, Eure – 1824, Madras, India) was a French naturalist and explorer. He was the stepson of Georges Cuvier. Journeys in South and Southeast Asia In December 1817, Duvaucel left France for British India and arrived in Calcutta in May 1818, where he met Pierre-Médard Diard. Together, they moved to Chandernagore, then a trading post of the French East India Company, and started collecting animals and plants for the Paris Museum of Natural History. They employed hunters who supplied them daily with live and dead specimens, which they described, drew and classified. They also received objects from local ''rajahs'' and went hunting themselves. In the garden of their compound, they cultivated local plants and kept water birds in a basin. In June 1818, they sent their first consignment to Paris, containing a skeleton of a Ganges river dolphin, a head of a "Tibetan ox", various species of little-known birds, some mineral samples and a drawing of a ''t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Évreux
Évreux () is a commune in and the capital of the department of Eure, in the French region of Normandy. Geography The city is on the Iton river. Climate History In late Antiquity, the town, attested in the fourth century CE, was named ''Mediolanum Aulercorum'', "the central town of the Aulerci", the Gallic tribe then inhabiting the area. Mediolanum was a small regional centre of the Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis. Julius Caesar wintered eight legions in this area after his third campaigning season in the battle for Gaul (56-55 BC): Legiones VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII and XIV. The present-day name of ''Évreux'' originates from the Gallic tribe of Eburovices, literally ''Those who overcome by the yew?'', from the Gaulish root '' eburos''. Counts of Évreux The first known members of the family of the counts of Évreux were descended from an illegitimate son of Richard I, duke of Normandy; these counts became extinct in the male line with the death of Count ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malayan Tapir
The Malayan tapir (''Tapirus indicus''), also called Asian tapir, Asiatic tapir and Indian tapir, is the only tapir species native to Southeast Asia from the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra. It has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2008, as the population is estimated to comprise fewer than 2,500 mature individuals. Taxonomy The scientific name ''Tapirus indicus'' was proposed by Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest in 1819 who referred to a tapir described by Pierre-Médard Diard. ''Tapirus indicus brevetianus'' was coined by a Dutch zoologist in 1926 who described a black Malayan tapir from Sumatra that had been sent to Rotterdam Zoo in the early 1920s. Phylogenetic analyses of 13 Malayan tapirs showed that the species is monophyletic. It was placed in the genus ''Acrocodia'' by Colin Groves and Peter Grubb in 2011. However, a comparison of mitochondrial DNA of 16 perissodactyl species revealed that the Malayan tapir forms a sister group together with the ''Tapirus'' speci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Everard Home
Sir Everard Home, 1st Baronet, FRS (6 May 1756, in Kingston upon Hull – 31 August 1832, in London) was a British surgeon. Home was born in Kingston-upon-Hull and educated at Westminster School. He gained a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, but decided instead to become a pupil of his brother-in-law, John Hunter, at St George's Hospital. Hunter had married his sister, the poet and socialite Anne Home, in July 1771. He assisted Hunter in many of his anatomical investigations, and in the autumn of 1776 he partly described Hunter's collection. There is also considerable evidence that Home plagiarized Hunter's work, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly; he also systematically destroyed his brother-in-law's papers in order to hide evidence of this plagiarism. It seems likely that the fire (in Home's apartments at Chelsea Hospital) which destroyed the Hunterian manuscripts in Home's possession also destroyed a precious collection of 26 microscopes originally made by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, recognising excellence in science, supporting outstanding science, providing scientific advice for policy, education and public engagement and fostering international and global co-operation. Founded on 28 November 1660, it was granted a royal charter by King Charles II as The Royal Society and is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world. The society is governed by its Council, which is chaired by the Society's President, according to a set of statutes and standing orders. The members of Council and the President are elected from and by its Fellows, the basic members of the society, who are themselves elected by existing Fellows. , there are about 1,700 fellows, allowed to use the postnominal title FRS (Fellow of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dugong
The dugong (; ''Dugong dugon'') is a marine mammal. It is one of four living species of the order Sirenia, which also includes three species of manatees. It is the only living representative of the once-diverse family Dugongidae; its closest modern relative, Steller's sea cow (''Hydrodamalis gigas''), was hunted to extinction in the 18th century. The dugong is the only sirenian in its range, which spans the waters of some 40 countries and territories throughout the Indo-West Pacific. The dugong is largely dependent on seagrass communities for subsistence and is thus restricted to the coastal habitats which support seagrass meadows, with the largest dugong concentrations typically occurring in wide, shallow, protected areas such as bays, mangrove channels, the waters of large inshore islands and inter-reefal waters. The northern waters of Australia between Shark Bay and Moreton Bay are believed to be the dugong's contemporary stronghold. Like all modern sirenians, the dugong ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bordering the Strait of Malacca to the west, the Singapore Strait to the south, the South China Sea to the east, and the Straits of Johor to the north. The country's territory is composed of one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet; the combined area of these has increased by 25% since the country's independence as a result of extensive land reclamation projects. It has the third highest population density in the world. With a multicultural population and recognising the need to respect cultural identities of the major ethnic groups within the nation, Singapore has four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. English is the lingua franca and numerous public services are available only in Eng ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Argus (bird)
An argus, or argus pheasant, is a member of a clade in the tribe Pavonini of the family Phasianidae, containing two species of bird that are closely related to peafowl. It has hundreds or thousands of tiny white spots on its plumage pattern, and thus its naming might have been in reference to the mythical hundred-eyed giant, Argus Panoptes. Two genera of birds are considered arguses: '' Rheinardia'' and ''Argusianus''. Within these genera there are a total of three recognized species. ''Argusianus'' has also been credited with a mysterious second species that is sometimes thought to have gone extinct, but this is most likely based on a simple genetic aberration in the established species. Both genera are thought to be sister taxa to one another, and are otherwise most closely related to the peafowl (genera '' Pavo'' and ''Afropavo''), and slightly more distantly to the genus ''Tropicoperdix.'' *Genus ''Argusianus'' Rafinesque, 1815 **Great argus (''Argusianus argus'' (Linnae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
