Physician, polymath, traveller, artist and naturalist, Pierre Belon (1517- 1564), was most famously a founding protagonist for the phenomenon of homology in comparative anatomy. He obtained his medical degree at the University of Paris and, under the patronage of King Francis I, Belon was sent on diplomatic missions abroad which allowed him to study the wildlife of the eastern Mediterranean.
Belon was regarded as a great savant of the 16th century and he is one of the initiators of modern natural history. The appearance in 1553 of Belon’s work on fish, molluscs and aquatic mammals - ‘De Aquatilibus’ - constituted the greatest single advance in the scientific study and classification of fish since Aristotle. It was a standard ichthyology text well into the 17th century, before it was superseded.