ABSTRACT
The scientific accomplishments of Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny (1802-1857) were truly remarkable. He worked tirelessly, contributing to a number of disciplines, and it seems likely that stress from the pressure of work, travel, and rivalries contributed to a heart condition, implicated in his untimely death at the age of 54. His life’s work, reviewed in a volume published in the bicentennial year commemorating his birth (Taquet 2002), included compendious taxonomic descriptions and/or diagnoses and illustrations of fossil and living Bryozoa. d’Orbigny’s paleontological collection largely survives and is located in the Salle d’Orbigny, Laboratoire de Paléontologie du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (Lauriat-Rage 2002). In the context of revising the bryozoan part of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, we examined the d’Orbigny Collection in 2001. All available nominal type specimens of d’Orbigny’s genera, Recent and fossil, were borrowed and imaged using environmental SEM by PDT before being returned to Paris. This Treatise-related work and the results of electron microscopy will be made available on a website that is under development (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/palaeontology/dorbigny/). Taylor & Gordon (2002) gave an
overview of all of d’Orbigny’s publications dealing with Bryozoa, published in the 14-year period between 1841 and 1854. In these works, d’Orbigny introduced approximately 203 new genera and 1141 new species, predominantly Cretaceous (d’Orbigny 1851-54), but also including Recent taxa (d’Orbigny 1841-47).
