Albert Gaudry

Jean Albert Gaudry, known as Albert Gaudry, was a French geologist and paleontologist born September 16, 1827, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, who died November 27, 1908, and who was educated at the College Stanislas in Paris, was appointed assistant to Alcide Dessalines Orbigny, the first holder of the paleontology chair at the Paris Museum of Natural History, in 1853, and succeeded to that chair himself in 1872. Beginning explorations in Cyprus and Greece at age twenty-five and residing in Greece from 1855 to 1860, he investigated the fossil vertebrate deposits at Pikermi, uncovering a Miocene mammalian fauna with forms intermediate between European, Asiatic and African types, and became, from his 1866 work, one of the first scientists to construct phylogenetic trees for fossil forms; he was a prominent advocate of theistic evolution, viewing evolution as a divine plan rather than accepting Darwin mechanism of natural selection alone. He published Animaux fossiles et geologie de Attique between 1862 and 1867, Les Enchainements du monde animal dans les temps geologiques between 1878 and 1890, and Essai de paleontologie philosophique in 1896, was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1882, was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1895 and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1900, presided over the eighth International Geological Congress in Paris in 1900, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1884.