Joachim Barrande

Joachim Barrande was a French geologist and paleontologist born August 11, 1799, in Saugues, Haute-Loire, France, who died October 5, 1883, in Frohsdorf, Austria-Hungary, and who trained as an engineer at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees before serving as tutor to the French royal family and accompanying them into exile after 1830. Settling in Prague in 1831, he devoted himself to the Lower Paleozoic fossils of Bohemia, conducting systematic research between 1840 and 1850 that collected more than 3,500 species, and publishing his monumental Systeme silurien du centre de la Boheme in more than twenty volumes between 1852 and 1894, focused extensively on trilobites and reportedly funded at a personal cost of roughly ten thousand pounds. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1862, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1870, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1875, received the Wollaston Medal in 1857, and opposed Charles Darwin theory of evolution in favor of catastrophism; the Barrandov district of Prague was named in his honor in 1928.