Paul Alfred Pételot (1885–1965)[1] was a French botanist and entomologist, whose primary scholarly focus was on medicinal plants in Southeast Asia.
[2] Some sources list his date of death as 1940,[2] but several herbaria specimens are recorded as being collected by him up until 1944 including Carex kucyniakii (1944),[3] Teijsmanniodendron peteloti (1941), Amalocalyx microlobus (1941), Amalocalyx microlobus (1942), Trichosanthes kerrii (1944) and Siraitia siamensis (1944).
In 1919 he was working in the cryptogamy department of the French National Museum of Natural History (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle) and had been accepted as a member of the French Society of Plant Pathology (Société de Pathologie végétale de France) and the Botanical Society of France (Societe Botanique de France).
He then moved to Southeast Asia and in 1922 joined the entomological station of Cho-Gank (Tonkin) and became a professor at the Hanoi School of Agriculture.
[2] He collected a large number of botanical specimens from Southeast Asia which have been deposited in the French National Museum of Natural History.