Pierre Belon (1517–1564) was a French traveller, naturalist, writer and diplomat. Like many others of the Renaissance period, he studied and wrote on a range of topics including ichthyology, ornithology, botany, comparative anatomy, architecture and Egyptology. He is sometimes known as Pierre Belon du Mans, or, in the Latin in which his works appeared, as Petrus Bellonius Cenomanus. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov called him the "prophet of comparative anatomy".
Pierre Belon
A comparison of the skeleton of birds and man in Natural History of Birds, 1555
A page from Histoire de la nature des estranges poissons marins, 1551
Portraits d'oyseaux, animaux, serpens, herbes, arbres, hommes et femmes, d'Arabie et Egypte, 1557
Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish, including bony fish (Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha). According to FishBase, 33,400 species of fish had been described as of October 2016, with approximately 250 new species described each year.
Fish represent approximately 8% of all figurative depictions on Mimbres pottery.
Frontispiece from Ichthyologia, sive Opera Omnia de Piscibus by Peter Artedi
Image: Male whale shark at Georgia Aquarium
Image: Paedocypris progenetica 001
