Alfred Duvaucel

French naturalist and explorer
Alfred Duvaucel (1793, Bièvres, Essonne – 1824, Madras, India) was a French naturalist and explorer. He was the stepson of Georges Cuvier.

In December 1817, Duvaucel left France for British India and arrived in Calcutta in May 1818, where he met Pierre Médard Diard. Together, they moved to Chandernagore, then a trading post of the French East India Company, and started collecting animals and plants for the Paris Museum of Natural History. They employed hunters who supplied them daily with live and dead specimens, which they described, drew and classified. They also received objects from local rajahs and went hunting themselves. In the garden of their compound, they cultivated local plants and kept water birds in a basin. In June 1818, they sent their first consignment to Paris, containing a skeleton of a Ganges river dolphin, a head of a "Tibetan ox", various species of little known birds, some mineral samples and a drawing of a tapir from Sumatra that they had studied in Hastings' menagerie. Later consignments included a live Cashmere goat, crested pheasants and various birds. In December 1818, Thomas Stamford Raffles invited them to accompany him on his journeys and pursue their collections in places where he would have to go officially. He offered to establish a menagerie in his Bencoulen residence. By end of December, they left with him on the basis they would equally share the collected animals. In Pulo Pinang, they collected two new fish species and some birds. In Achem, they collected only a few plants, insects, birds, snakes, fish and two deer. In Malacca, they bought a bear, an argus and some other birds. In Singapore, they obtained a dugong, of which they prepared drawings and a description that Raffles sent to the Royal Society. These were published in 1820 by Everard Home and planned for publication in the Histoire naturelle des mammifères by Étienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire and Frédéric Cuvier. After their arrival at Bencoulen in August 1819, Raffles requisitioned most of their collection and left them copies of their drawings, descriptions and notes. Duvaucel and Diard took leave, sent their share to Calcutta and parted. But due to political circumstances, he had to restrict his excursions to the territories of Benares in Bengal, and Kathmandu in "Nepaul". There is no record however that he ever traveled to Nepal, and the editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal noted in 1836 that two of Duvaucel's collectors lived for a year with Brian Houghton Hodgson at Kathmandu. Duvaucel died in August 1824 in Madras, but his obituary was not published until April 1825. Ten years later, rumours were afloat in France that he was mauled by a tiger within minutes.

In February 1820, the Asiatick Society (Calcutta, India) published an article jointly written by Duvaucel and Diard entitled "Sur une nouvelle espèce de Sorex — Sorex Glis" including a drawing of a common treeshrew. In spring 1822, the Asiatick Society published his article "On the Black Deer of Bengal" including a drawing of a deer species that he had observed in Bengal, Sumatra, and in the mountains north of Sylhet.