Jean Baptiste Boisduval

Jean Baptiste Alphonse Déchauffour de Boisduval (24 June 1799 – 30 December 1879) was a French lepidopterist, botanist, and physician.

He was one of the most celebrated lepidopterists of France, and was the co-founder of the Société Entomologique de France. While best known abroad for his work in entomology, he started his career in botany, collecting a great number of French plant specimens and writing broadly on the topic throughout his career, including the textbook Flores française in 1828. Early in his career, he was interested in Coleoptera and allied himself with both Lacordaire and Latreille. He was the curator of the Pierre Françoise Marie Auguste Dejean collection in Paris and described many species of beetles, as well as butterflies and moths, resulting from the voyages of the Astrolabe, the expedition ship of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse and the "Coquille", that of Louis Isidore Duperrey.

He left Paris, where he had lived for nearly 60 years, in 1875, to retire in Ticheville near his family. His brother was Adolphe-Armand d'Echauffour de Boisduval (September 26, 1801 – March 1, 1842), a doctor, naturalist, and health officer in their native Ticheville.

Boisduval's Elateridae are in the Natural History Museum, London and the types of Curculionidae in Brussels Natural History Museum. His Lepidoptera were sold to Charles Oberthür. The Sphingidae are in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.