Arthur René Jean Baptiste Bavay

Arthur René Jean Baptiste Bavay , also short Arthur Bavay , (born April 29, 1840 in Lamballe , Côtes-du-Nord , Bretagne , † July 13, 1923 in Paris ) was a French marine doctor , herpetologist , parasitologist and malacologist .

Life

Bavay was the son of a medic. After his medical training at the Naval School in Brest from 1858 to 1864, he came to New Caledonia, where he was stationed from 1864 to 1869, as an employee of the pharmaceutical department of the Navy via Cochinchina (what is now southern Vietnam). In 1869 Bavay traveled to Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles , where he worked for six years. He then returned to France, where he taught medical natural history, first at the medical school at the military port of Toulon , the main French naval base on the Mediterranean, and then at the naval school in Brest.

In 1896 he moved to Paris, where he worked as a naval chief surgeon. He was also a member of the Supreme Health Council. In 1902 he was retired. In the same year he was elected President of the Société zoologique de France . From the 1860s onwards, Bavay regularly published zoological articles, including in 1872 the catalog des reptiles de la Nouvelle-Calédonie et description d'espèces nouvelles, the first catalog on the reptiles of New Caledonia. From 1904 he devoted himself exclusively to malacology.

Bavay had a long relationship with the naturalists of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle and in 1909 he was officially appointed a corresponding member by the museum. Bavay's herpetological collections are kept in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris and the Natural History Museum in London. Until three days before his death, he worked in a laboratory in the Brest Naval Museum.

Dedication names

The species Eurydactylodes vieillardi , Rhacodactylus chahoua and Lygostoma arborum described by Bavay in 1869 have the common names Bavay's Gecko, Bavay's Giant Gecko and Bavay's Skink. In 1913 Jean Roux named the New Caledonian gecko genus Bavayia in honor of Arthur Bavay. In 1939 René Bourret Bavay dedicated the skinkart Tropidophorus baviensis .

Publications (selection)

• Etude sur deux plantes de la Nouvelle-Calédonie , 1869
• Catalog des reptiles de la Nouvelle-Calédonie et description d'espèces nouvelles , 1872
• Note sur l'hylodes martinicensis et ses métamorphoses , 1872
• Récolte des mollusques: conseils aux voyageurs , 1895
• Diagnoses de coquilles nouvelles de l'Indo-Chine , 1900 (with Philippe Dautzenberg )
• Descriptions de quelques nouvelles espèces du Genre Pecten , 1904
• Les lacs des hauts plateaux de l'Amérique du Sud , 1906 (with Maurice Neveu-Lemaire and Edward Asahel Birge )
• Mollusques terrestres et fluviatiles récoltés par le Dr. Neveu-Lemaire (Mission de Créqui-Montfort et Sénéchal de la Grange en Amérique du Sud) , 1904
• Les lamellibranches de l'expédition du Siboga , 1912 (with Philippe Dautzenberg)

literature

• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012. ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 . Pp. 133-134