Alcide D'Orbigny - South American Era

South American Era

D'Orbigny travelled on a mission for the Paris Museum, in South America between 1826 and 1833. He visited Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia and Peru and returned to France with an enormous collection of more than 10,000 natural history specimens. He described part of his findings in La Relation du Voyage dans l'Amérique Méridionale pendant les annés 1826 à 1833 (Paris, 1824–47, in 90 fascicles. His contemporary, Charles Darwin called this book "one of the great monuments of science in the 19th century". The other specimens were described by zoologists at the museum. He had numerous interactions with Darwin, and named certain species after Darwin; for example d'Orbigny assigned the common name Darwin's rhea to the South American bird Rhea pennata.

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