Alain Dubois

Alain Camille Paul Dubois (born June 4, 1948 in Paris ) is a French herpetologist and professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle .

Life

Dubois is the son of Jacques and Suzanne Dubois. As a child he already collected fish, insects and tadpoles, and at the age of twelve he wrote his first dissemination notes. He later became a member of SONALYCA (SOciété des NAturalistes du LYcée CArnot) and was an avid reader of the writings of Jean-Henri Fabre . He was also influenced by Jean Rostand , who researched experimental embryology and abnormalities in amphibians . As a scientist, Dubois regularly attended Sunday afternoons at Rostand's home in Ville-d'Avray , where celebrities from the arts, literature and science discussed their work. Under the direction of Jean Rostand, he began working on amphibious abnormalities and published his first scientific papers on these topics. After graduating from school in 1964, he enrolled in the science faculty of the University of Paris in 1965 , where he studied biology in the fields of zoology , animal physiology , embryology, genetics and ecology, as well as psychology and English. While at university, Dubois took part in the student riots of May 1968. In the same year he hitchhiked or took a bus trip from Paris via Turkey , Iran , Afghanistan , Pakistan , India to Nepal , where he spent 14 months studying the frog auger. Dubois collected over 10,000 samples, made precise field notes, and perfected his knowledge of Nepal's amphibians by describing numerous new species as well as identifying ranges and biogeographical patterns.

The material collected in Nepal served Dubois as the basis for his dissertation Contribution à l'étude des Amphibiens du Népal: les Grenouilles du sous-genre Paa (Famille Ranidae, Genre Rana) , with which he in 1976 under the direction of Maxime Lamotte at the École normal supérieure de Paris was awarded a doctorate in philosophy.

Dubois' previous studies of the abnormalities in European frogs and toads were most helpful for him as if he a large number of Nepalese frogs for intraspecific study of biodiversity studied. He extended his taxonomic work to South and Southeast Asia and sought a global approach to the nomenclature and taxonomy of amphibians.

In 1978 Dubois got a job as a technician at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN). In 1989 he was appointed Professeur des Grands établissements and Directeur de Laboratoire du Muséum. During his time at MNHN, he held numerous administrative roles at the local and national level, particularly for research and administration in the museum and recruiting researchers for both the MNHN and across the country. With the museum's changing rules and regulations, new areas of responsibility developed for Dubois at MNHN, allowing him to devote more time to research.

Dubois spent an important part of his career doing field studies and collective expeditions. He visited around 20 countries in Europe, Asia and North Africa. In addition to his outstanding collection of Nepalese amphibians, he made important contributions to the amphibian collections of France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Pakistan, Spain and Turkey.

Dubois' research interests include the evolutionary systematics of the amphibians, in particular the frogs of the Oriental and Palearctic , using morphology and morphometry as methods, revisions and the description of new taxa, theoretical works of general interest in zoology, conservation biology, evolutionary system and the nomenclature of amphibians and reptiles, population biology of European amphibians, the conservation of species and populations of amphibians and their habitats, and the bioacoustics of amphibians.

Dubois described more than 120 taxa, of which more than half are genera.

Honorary Citizen and Dedication Names

In 2011 Dubois was made an honorary citizen of the Italian municipality of Fagnano Castello . In 2006 and 2010 the rowing frog species Raorchestes dubois and Rhacophorus duboisi and in 2016 the frog species Indirana duboisi from the family Ranixalidae were named after Alain Dubois.

Fonts (selection)

• La nomenclature supragénérique des amphibiens Anoures , 1984
• Le genre en zoologie: Essai de systématique théorique , 1988
• The genus in zoology: A contribution to the theory of evolutionary systematics , 1988
• Service of Disparus , 1999
• (with Pierre Drogi) Métamorphoses , 2008
• (with Julien Delord and Philippe Bouchet) L'extinction d'espèce: Histoire d'un concept et enjeux éthiques , 2010
• (with Jean Rostand and Jacques Testart) Un biologiste contre le nucléaire , 2012
• (with MJ Fouquette, Jr.) A checklist of North American amphibians and reptiles: the United States and Canada , 2014
• (with Annemarie Ohler ) La vie des grenouilles, 2015
• (with Annemarie Ohler) Évolution, extinction: le message des grenouilles , 2017
• (with Klaus Henle ) Studies on anomalies in natural populations of amphibians , 2017
• (with Claude Miaud and Jean Muratet) Les amphibiens de France: guide d'identification des oeufs et des larves , 2018

literature

• Interview: Alain Dubois In: Fabrizio Li Vigni: A Life for Reptiles and Amphibians , Edition Chimaira, 2013, ISBN 978-3-89973-199-6 , pp. 95-106
• Annemarie Ohler: Alain Dubois - a batrachologist's life. Alytes 36 (1-4), 2018, pp. 5-12

Web links

• Bibliography at Google Scholar
• Literature by and about Alain Dubois in the WorldCat bibliographic database