Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
French zoologist (1805-1861)

Bélanger, Charles (1834). "Section IV. Carnassiers". In Bertrand, Arthus (ed.). Voyage aux Indes-orientales, par le nord de l'Europe (in French). A. Bertrand.
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (French pronunciation: [izidɔʁ ʒɔfʁwa sɛ̃t‿ilɛʁ]; 16 December 1805 – 10 November 1861) was a French zoologist and an authority on deviation from normal structure. In 1854 he coined the term éthologie (ethology).
Biography
He was born in Paris, the son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In his earlier years he showed an aptitude for mathematics, but eventually he devoted himself to the study of natural history and of medicine, and in 1824 he was appointed assistant naturalist to his father. In 1829 he delivered for his father the second part of a course of lectures on ornithology, and during the following three years he taught zoology at the Athénée, and teratology at the École pratique.
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This entry incorporates text from “Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire” 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.