IN MEMORIAM: JEAN DORST, 1924-2001

Auk, The, Oct 2004 by Vuilleumier, François

Jean Dorst, former director of the National Museum of Natural History (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle; MNHN) in Paris, a member of the French Académie des Sciences, one of the founders and second president of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos, president of the 16th International Ornithological Congress (IOC), and vice president of the Commission of Protection of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), died on 8 August 2001 in Paris, after a long illness. He had turned 77 the day before. Dorst's extraordinarily diverse and productive career has been reported in ornithological journals, in popular magazines, and in the daily press in France and other countries.

Dorst became a Corresponding Fellow of the AOU in 1960 and an Honorary Fellow in 1973. He was also an honorary member of the British Ornithologists' Union. He was president of the Société Ornithologique de France in 1966-1967. During the 1960s to 1980s, he helped organize international ornithological congresses as a member of the IOC Permanent Executive Committee and as a member of its standing Committee on Ornithological Nomenclature. In 1974, he was president of the 14th IOC in Canberra, Australia.

Jean Dorst was born near Mulhouse (Alsace, France) on 7 August 1924. As a boy, perhaps under the influence of his father, a textile industrialist who collected butterflies as a hobby, Dorst started to collect animals and plants. After studies in biology and paleontology at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris (Sorbonne), Dorst began his long-term career at the MNHN on 1 January 1947, when he was hired as "assistant" in the "Laboratoire de Zoologie (Mammifères et Oiseaux)." He then became, successively, "sousdirecteur" (1949), and "professeur titulaire" and chairman of Mammifères et Oiseaux (1964; he was only 40). In that last position, Dorst followed a roster of only five distinguished predecessors: Etienne, then Henri, Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire; Henri, then Alphonse, Milne-Edwards; and Jacques Berlioz. Dorst was elected to the directorship of the MNHN in 1975 and re-elected in 1980. In 1985, he resigned from the directorship of the MNHN, before the end of his second term, to protest the French Government's radical administrative changes in the structure of the venerable establishment, which he, like all of its personnel, affectionately called "la maison." Those so-called "reforms," imposed by the government against the wishes of the museum's staff, meant "serious threats to the independence and originality" of the museum. Unfortunately, Dorst's sad predictions have come to pass.

Dorst obtained his Ph.D. in 1949, the same year he was promoted to "sous-directeur" at MNHN. His doctoral dissertation, prepared under Professors E. Bourdelle and J. Berlioz, dealt with the structural colors of humming-bird feathers. In the 1970s, he published several papers on structural colors in bird-of-paradise feathers, examined through scanning electron microscopy. An all-around naturalist, he traveled widely, and was an elected member of the exclusive Société des Explorateurs. In the mid-1980s, he and I co-authored a book chapter on convergences among taxa and avifaunas living at high altitudes in the tropical belt around the world. Although Dorst was very fond of Africa's high mountains, his long-term stomping ground was the Andes of South America. From 1954 onward, he made several long trips to Peru, where he studied especially the high Andean puna. He published seminal papers on the ecology of the puna avifauna and on the breeding biology of several of its endemic species. His 1967 book, South America and Central America: A Natural History (originally published in English and translated into French in 1969), reflects not only his personal experiences in the Neotropics, but also his broad erudition.

In 1958, coincident with the centennial of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sent Dorst to the Galapagos Islands on a reconnaissance mission-to study the possibility of establishing a research station on the islands. A group of remarkable men with farreaching vision (including Victor van Straelen, Harold Coolidge, jean-G. Baer, Julian Huxley, François Bourlière, Dillon Ripley, Robert Bowman, Peter Scott, and others) founded the Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos. Dorst was Secretary General of the foundation from its inception until 1964 and its president from 1964 to 1967. A fascinating brochure, The First Seven Years of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Isles, 1959-1966 by Jean Dorst and Jacques Lamelle, tells the story of the very difficult beginnings of what became a permanent research station. Without Jean Dorst's energy and administrative savvy, the Galapagos biological station as we know it today would not exist, and much of the research carried out in those islands since the early 1960s might not have been possible. Evolutionary biology thus owes a huge intellectual debt to Dorst.