Marcellin Boule et les types du Prodrome d'Alcide d'Orbigny

During its thirty first years, from 1906 to 1937, the Annales de Paléontologie included, at the instigation of Marcellin Boule, many articles apparently anonymous, devolved to the d'Orbigny's types of the Prodrome. In these articles, not easy to cite because the most part not signed and for some even not titled, are rediscribed and illustrated the species established by d'Orbigny in 1850 and 1852 in his Prodrome de Paléontologie stratigraphique universelle, but then briefly characterized and not figured. It is in fact a collective work, widely remained unfinished but which however totalizes 510 text pages and 139 photographic plates, in the course of which the authors, Armand Thévenin, Ferdinand Canu and Jean Cottreau, redefined more than one thousand species (molluscs, brachiopods, echinoderms, bryozoans, madreporaria and porifers) disposed from the Lower Silurian to the Neocomian, according to the stratigraphic levels then established by d'Orbigny. This redefinition of the d'Orbigny's types of the Prodrome makes up a comprehensive work, the interest of which being possibly evaluated by the numerous quotations referring to it in the former and also recent publications on invertebrate paleontology, this in spite of the questionable choice of some of the type specimens then proposed.