Édouard Ménétries
French entomologist and ornithologist (1802–1861)
Édouard Ménétries (French pronunciation: [edwaʁ menetʁi]; Paris, France, 2 October 1802 – St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, 10 April 1861) was a French entomologist, zoologist, and herpetologist. He is best known as the founder of the Russian Entomological Society.
Ménétries was born in Paris, and became a student of Georges Cuvier and Pierre André Latreille. On their recommendation he was chosen as the zoologist on a Russian expedition to Brazil in 1822, led by Baron von Langsdorff. On his return he was appointed curator of the Zoological Collection at St Petersburg. In 1829 he was sent by the Tsar on an exploratory trip to the Caucasus.
Ménétries was an authority on Lepidoptera and Coleoptera but also worked on other orders. Most of his named species are from Russia and Siberia but at the museum he was able to study insects from other parts of the world. Two such collections were those made during the expeditions of Alexander von Middendorf (1842–1845) and Leopold von Schrenck (1853–1857) to California and Alaska as well as Siberia.
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This entry incorporates text from “Édouard Ménétries” 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.