Prosper Garnot

Prosper Garnot (1794 to 1838) was a French surgeon and naturalist, born at Brest. He served as an assistant surgeon under Louis Isidore Duperrey aboard the corvette La Coquille during its circumnavigation of the globe from 1822 to 1825. Together with René Primevère Lesson he gathered many natural history specimens in South America and the Pacific. A severe attack of dysentery forced him to be sent home with part of the collection aboard the Castle Forbes, and those specimens were lost when that ship was wrecked off the Cape of Good Hope in July 1824. Garnot and Lesson nevertheless wrote the zoological section of the official report of the voyage, published between 1828 and 1832. He died in Paris at the age of forty-four. The widely distributed Indo-Pacific house gecko Hemidactylus garnotii, described by Duméril and Bibron in 1836, was named in his honour.