Jean-Louis Alléon-Dulac (1723–1788) was a French

naturalist Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

. Jean-Louis Alléon-Dulac was born in

Saint-Étienne Saint-Étienne (; Franco-Provençal: ''Sant-Etiève''), also written St. Etienne, is a city and the prefecture of the Loire département, in eastern-central France, in the Massif Central, southwest of Lyon, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regi ...

Loire The Loire ( , , ; ; ; ; ) is the longest river in France and the 171st longest in the world. With a length of , it drains , more than a fifth of France's land, while its average discharge is only half that of the Rhône. It rises in the so ...

, the son of an adviser of the king. He became a lawyer at the Parliament of Lyon between 1748 and 1765, Director of the post office, Warehouse keeper of tobacco and Receiver of the Lottery of Saint-Etienne, but is especially known as a naturalist. He wrote ''Mélange d'histoire naturelle'' (1754) and ''Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des provinces de Lyonnais, Forez et Beaujolais'', printed by Claude Cizeron at Lyon in 1765. In this last work, he gave a detailed description of the

quarries A quarry is a type of open-pit mine in which dimension stone, rock, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, gravel, or slate is excavated from the ground. The operation of quarries is regulated in some jurisdictions to manage their safet ...

and mines of these areas and one of the first figures of an

ammonite Ammonoids are extinct, (typically) coiled-shelled cephalopods comprising the subclass Ammonoidea. They are more closely related to living octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (which comprise the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family N ...

. He was also the first to identify the

belemnite Belemnitida (or belemnites) is an extinct order (biology), order of squid-like cephalopods that existed from the Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous (And possibly the Eocene). Unlike squid, belemnites had an internal skeleton that made up the cone ...

s as

cephalopods A cephalopod is any member of the molluscan Taxonomic rank, class Cephalopoda (Greek language, Greek plural , ; "head-feet") such as a squid, octopus, cuttlefish, or nautilus. These exclusively marine animals are characterized by bilateral symm ...

. He died at Saint-Etienne.

References

*Larousse, P. 1865-1876 (Biography) ''Grand Dict. du XIX. Siècle'' 1 221 * Rose, H. J. 1850, ''New General Biographical Dictionary'' 1 {{DEFAULTSORT:Alleon-Dulac, Jean-Louis 1723 births 1788 deaths Scientists from Saint-Étienne 18th-century French naturalists French entomologists