Paul Gervais full name François Louis Paul Gervaise (26 September 1816 – 10 February 1879) was a French palaeontologist and entomologist.

Biography

Gervais was born in Paris, where he obtained the diplomas of doctor of science and of medicine, and in 1835 he began palaeontological research as assistant in the laboratory of comparative anatomy at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. In 1841 he obtained the chair of zoology and comparative anatomy at the Faculty of Sciences in Montpellier, of which he was in 1856 appointed dean. In 1848-1852 appeared his important work Zoologie et paléontologie françaises, supplementary to the palaeontological publications of Georges Cuvier and Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville; of this a second and greatly improved edition was issued in 1859. In 1865 he accepted the professorship of zoology at the Sorbonne, vacant through the death of Louis Pierre Gratiolet; this post he left in 1868 for the chair of comparative anatomy at the Paris museum of natural history, the anatomical collections of which were greatly enriched by his exertions. He died in Paris on 10 February 1879.

Paul Gervais is an American novelist and garden-designer, who has also written a personal memoir. His novel, Extraordinary People, was nominated for the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992.

Early life and studies

George Paul Gervais Jr. was born in America in 1946 at Waterville, Maine, to George Paul and Doris Boyd Gervais. His father was born George Paul Beede, in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1908, but adopted the name of his step-father, Gervais, when he was 26 years old. (He was directly descended in the paternal line from Elie de Bédée des Aulnais, born in Britain on the island of Jersey, of a French Protestant family of Anger and Brittany, who had fled France after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes. Elie de Bédée emigrated to New England in America in 1707.)

Gervais attended Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where he earned his B.A. in English Literature in 1969. He also attended San Francisco State University, where he studied poetry with Robert Creeley and Philip Lamantia. In 1980 he earned his Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute.