André Marie Constant Duméril was born on 1 January 1774 in Amiens and died on 14 August 1860 in Paris.

In 1851, the two Dumérils, father and son, published the Catalogue méthodique de la collection des reptiles (although Auguste was apparently the true author) and in 1853, André Duméril alone published Prodrome de la classification des reptiles ophidiens.

Duméril, upon discovering a case of preserved fishes in the attic of the house of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, finally described the species that had been collected by Philibert Commerson nearly 70 years earlier.

He then published a very important work, l’Erpétologie générale ou Histoire naturelle complète des reptiles (nine volumes, 1834–1854).

However, Duméril maintained the amphibians among the reptiles in spite of the work of Alexandre Brongniart or Pierre André Latreille or the anatomical discoveries of Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) and Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858).