The scene took place in December 1964, in Paris, at France’s National Museum of Natural History (MNHN). Jean-Pierre Lehman, then the chair of paleontology, invited a student to his office and explained that in Niger, geologists from the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) searching for uranium to fuel Charles de Gaulle’s civil nuclear program had stumbled upon fossilized bones. Identifying these fossils would make it possible to date the geological layers in which they were found. Was the student willing to take on this mission and travel to the Ténéré desert? With the enthusiasm of a 24-year-old, Philippe Taquet agreed: “I had never been to Africa,” he said 57 years later, in 2021. “Jean-Pierre Lehman pulled a plane ticket from his drawer and told me I was leaving the following Monday and that I mustn’t forget to take Nivaquine, for malaria.”
The “yes” Taquet gave on that December day in 1964 changed and shaped his life. “In reality,” he wrote in L’Empreinte des dinosaures (“The Footprint of the Dinosaurs”), “I was answering yes to the following question: ‘Do you agree to take paleontology as your spouse and serve her faithfully until the end of your days?'” True to his word, Taquet kept this vow until the end of his life. The great dinosaur hunter, a paleontologist to his core and spiritual great-grandson of the discipline’s founder, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), to whom he devoted a biography, died on Sunday, November 16, in Paris at the age of 85, his family told Le Monde.
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