Gerard Paul Deshayes

Gerard Paul Deshayes was a French geologist and conchologist born May 13, 1795, in Nancy, France, who died June 9, 1875, in Boran-sur-Oise, Oise, France, and who studied medicine in Strasbourg and earned a degree in letters from Paris in 1821 before turning to natural history and eventually becoming a professor at the Museum National Histoire Naturelle in Paris. His research on fossil mollusks of the Paris Basin and other Cenozoic regions, relating fossil species to their living equivalents, paralleled the work of Charles Lyell, with whom he collaborated on classifying the Tertiary system into the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene epochs, and he published Description des coquilles fossiles des environs de Paris between 1824 and 1837, the co-authored Histoire naturelle generale et particuliere des Mollusques terrestres et fluviatiles between 1820 and 1851, the Traite elementaire de conchyliologie between 1839 and 1857, and Mollusques de Algerie in 1848. He served multiple terms as chairman of the Societe Geologique de France and received the Wollaston Medal in 1870.