The family moved to La Rochelle in 1820, where his interest in natural history was developed while studying the marine fauna and especially the microscopic creatures that he named "foraminiferans".

He visited Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, 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).

In 1849 he published a closely related Prodrome de Paléontologie Stratigraphique, intended as a "Preface to Stratigraphic Palaeontology", in which he described almost 18,000 species, and with biostratigraphical comparisons erected geological stages, the definitions of which rest on their stratotypes.

In 1853 he became professor of palaeontology at the Paris Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, publishing his Cours élémentaire that related paleontology to zoology, as a science independent of the uses made of it in stratigraphy.

[16] La Gazette des Français du Paraguay, Alcide d'Orbigny – Voyageur Naturaliste pour le Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle dans le Cone Sud – Alcide d'Orbigny – Viajero Naturalista para el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Francia en el Cono Sur – Bilingue Français Espagnol – numéro 7, année 1, Asuncion Paraguay.