Paul Alfred Pételot


Paul Alfred Pételot was a French botanist and entomologist, whose primary scholarly focus was on medicinal plants in Southeast Asia. Some sources list his date of death as 1940, but several herbaria specimens are recorded as being collected by him up until 1944 including Carex kucyniakii, Teijsmanniodendron peteloti, Amalocalyx microlobus, Amalocalyx microlobus, Trichosanthes kerrii and Siraitia siamensis. In addition, he continued to author publications through the 1950s, though it is possible these are posthumous.

Life

Pételot was born in Saint-Max, France in 1885. His first professional posting was in 1908 as a member of the botany faculty at Nancy-Université. He then worked in Brazil and St. Petersburg, Russia before returning to France. In 1919 he was working in the cryptogamy department of the French National Museum of Natural History and had been accepted as a member of the French Society of Plant Pathology and the Botanical Society of France. He then moved to Southeast Asia and in 1922 joined the entomological station of Cho-Gank and became a professor at the Hanoi School of Agriculture. He moved to Saigon to become a lecturer at the Mixed Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy and then led the botanical division of the Scientific and Technical Research Center. He was elected as a laureate of the French Academy of Sciences.

Work

He collected a large number of botanical specimens from Southeast Asia which have been deposited in the French National Museum of Natural History.

Legacy

He is the authority on botanical taxa including:
Several taxa are named in his honor including: