Pierre-Médard Diard

Diard studied zoology and anatomy under Georges Cuvier and assisted him in researches on the development of the foetus and on the eggs of quadrupeds.

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.

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

In 1821, Raffles published descriptions of the species jointly collected by Diard and Duvaucel 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.

[8] Diard collected the first specimen of the Borneo freshwater crocodile first described as Crocodylus raninus by Salomon Müller and Hermann Schlegel in 1844.