Citizenship Netherlands Alma mater Utrecht University | Name Pieter Boddaert | |
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Died 6 May 1795
Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands Known for Physician, Natural history | ||
Pieter Boddaert (1730 or 1733, Middelburg – 6 May 1795, Utrecht) was a Dutch physician and naturalist.
Boddaert was the son of a Middelburg jurist and poet by the same name (1694–1760). The younger Pieter obtained his M.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1764 and there became a lecturer on natural history. Fourteen letters survive of his correspondence with Carl Linnaeus between 1768 and 1775. He was a friend of Albert Schlosser, whose cabinet of "curiosities" of natural history he described. In 1783 he published fifty copies of an identification key of Edmé-Louis Daubenton's Planches enluminées, the colored plates of illustrations for the comte de Buffon's monumental Histoire Naturelle (published 1749–89), assigning binomial scientific names to the plates. As many of these were the first Linnaean scientific names to be proposed, they remain in use.
In 1785 he published Elenchus Animalium, a "directory of animals" that included the first binomial names for a number of mammals, including the Quagga and the Tarpan.