Alfred Duvaucel

He was the stepson of Georges Cuvier and travelled in India and Southeast Asia as a collector of specimens for the Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Two years later his mother married Georges Cuvier who adopted her children Alfred, Thélème (1788–1809), Antoinette Sophie Laure (1789–1867) and Martial (1794–1871), and instilled an interest in natural history in them.

Duvaucel served briefly in military service in 1813, posted to Antwerp in 1814 as aide-de-camp to General Lazare Carnot, and resigned from it.

In December 1817, Duvaucel left Le Havre, France aboard the Seine under Captain Houssard for British India and arrived in Calcutta in May 1818, where he met Pierre-Médard Diard.

[1] Together, they moved to Chandernagore, then a trading post of the French East India Company, and started collecting animals and plants for the Paris Museum of Natural History.

In June 1818, they sent their first consignment to Paris, containing a skeleton of a Ganges river dolphin, a head of a "Tibetan ox", various species of little-known birds, some mineral samples and a drawing of a tapir from Sumatra that they had studied in Hastings' menagerie.

These were published in 1820 by Everard Home and planned for publication in the Histoire naturelle des mammifères by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Frédéric Cuvier.

[2]Duvaucel set off to Padang, and collected specimens of the Malayan tapir, Sumatran rhinoceros, several monkeys, reptiles, deer and axis in this area.

There is no record however that he ever traveled to Nepal,[6] and the editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal noted in 1836 that two of Duvaucel's collectors lived for a year with Brian Houghton Hodgson at Kathmandu.

[12] The Paris Museum of Natural History received nearly 2000 animals collected jointly by Duvaucel and Diard during their stay of more than a year in the Greater Sunda Islands.

In 1821, Raffles published descriptions of the species jointly collected by Duvaucel and Diard in Sumatra, including first descriptions of the sun bear, the binturong, the crab-eating macaque, the Sumatran surili, the siamang gibbon, the silvery lutung, the large bamboo rat, the large treeshrew and the cream-coloured giant squirrel.