Pierre-Médard Diard

Pierre-Médard Diard (19 March 1794 – 16 February 1863) was a French naturalist and explorer.

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. In 1816, he traveled to the East Indies.

In May 1818, he met Alfred Duvaucel in Calcutta. 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. They employed hunters who supplied them daily with live and dead specimens, which they described, drew and classified. They also received objects from local rajahs and went hunting themselves. In the garden of their compound, they cultivated local plants and kept water birds in a basin. 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. Later consignments included a live Cashmere goat, crested pheasants and various birds.

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