Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars

Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars (5 November 1758, Bournois – 12 May 1831, Paris) was a French botanist known for his work collecting and describing orchids from the three islands of Madagascar, Mauritius and Réunion.

[2] Petit-Thouars came from an aristocratic family of the region of Anjou, where he grew up in the castle of Boumois, near Saumur.

In 1792, after an imprisonment of two years during the French Revolution, he was exiled to Madagascar and the nearby islands such as La Réunion (then called Bourbon).

He started collecting many plant specimens on Madagascar, Mauritius and La Réunion.

He did pioneering botanical work by his descriptions of orchids from this region: 52 species from Mauritius and 55 from La Réunion.

Louis Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars
Angraecum crassum , a drawing of this orchid by Thouars in his book Orch. Il. Afr.