Michel Adanson
French naturalist (1727-1806)
Michel Adanson (7 April 1727 – 3 August 1806) was an 18th-century French botanist and naturalist who travelled to Senegal to study flora and fauna. He proposed a "natural system" of taxonomy distinct from the binomial system forwarded by Linnaeus. The standard author abbreviation Adans. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Personal history
Adanson was born at Aix-en-Provence. His family moved to Paris in 1730. After leaving the Collège Sainte-Barbe, he was employed in the cabinets of R. A. F. Réaumur and Bernard de Jussieu, as well as in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. He attended lectures at the Jardin du Roi and the Collège Royal in Paris from 1741 to 1746. At the end of 1748, funded by a director of the Compagnie des Indes, he left France on an exploring expedition to Senegal. He remained there for five years, collecting and describing numerous animals and plants.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michel Adanson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.