Jean Guibé

Jean Marius René Guibé (born February 18, 1910 in Paris , † May 4, 1999 in Caen ) was a French herpetologist . His main research interests were the frogs and snakes of Madagascar .

Live and act

Guibé's family comes from Normandy . His father was a surgeon. In 1930 he received the Baccalauréat from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Caen . He then studied medicine for a year, but then returned to the natural sciences and graduated in 1934. During his student days, Guibé established relationships with several researchers from the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, including the comparative anatomist Jacques Millot . In 1939 Guibé received his doctorate from the University of Caen. He served in the military during World War II. In 1945 he became Léon Bertin's assistant at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. Originally interested in the study of invertebrates, Bertin brought him to the field of herpetology. In 1949 Guibé led an expedition to Algeria and between 1950 and 1951 he worked in Madagascar. In 1957 he was Bertin's successor as head of the department for reptiles and fish at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. In 1975 Guibé retired for health reasons. The reptiles and fish department was split up and Édouard-Raoul Brygoo became head of the herpetological department.

Between 1946 and 1978, Guibé published more than 150 scientific articles. The majority included studies on amphibians and reptiles. He was particularly interested in systematics, anatomy, behavior and biogeography. He devoted himself to the frogs and snakes of Madagascar and West Africa, regions that were under the political administration of France for a long time. Guibé often worked with other herpetologists from the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, including Fernand Angel , Maxime Lamotte and Jacques Millot on the frog systematics and with Jean Anthony on the anatomy of snakes, especially the giant snakes .

He studied the sexual dimorphism of the Malagasy leaf-nosed snakes ( Langaha ). The reasons for the different nasal attachments of males and females and their function, however, are still unclear. Guibé described about 60 new taxa of scale creepers and frogs, including several new genera. He published several books, including the Catalog des types de lezards du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1950 and 1954 , the work Les Serpents de Madagascar in 1958 and a few textbooks, including Les plus beaux Reptiles , which was published in German in 1960 under the title Reptilien . In 1970 Guibé worked on the two volumes of reptiles in the book series Traité de Zoologie by Pierre-Paul Grassé , where he described the anatomy and behavior in 22 chapters. Guibé's last monograph was Les Batraciens des Madagascar from 1978. Of the 128 frogs mentioned in this book, 40 were first described by Guibé .

Dedication names

In 1959 Dick Hillenius named the Malagasy chameleon species Callumma guibei and Robert F. Inger named the toad species Ansonia guibei in 1966 in honor of Jean Guibé. In 1992, the Malagasy frog genus Guibemantis was named after Guibé.

literature

• Kraig Adler: Contributions to the History of Herpetology. Volume 2. Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, 2007, ISBN 978-0-916984-71-7 , pp. 218-219