Blainville was born at
Arques, near
Dieppe. As a young man, he went to Paris to study art, but ultimately devoted himself to
natural history. He attracted the attention of
Georges Cuvier, for whom he occasionally substituted as lecturer at the
Collège de France and at the
Athenaeum Club, London. In 1812, he was aided by Cuvier in acquiring the position of assistant professor of
anatomy and
zoology in the Faculty of Sciences at Paris. Eventually, relations between the two men soured, a situation that ended in open enmity. In 1819, Blainville was elected a member of the
American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia. In 1825, he was admitted a member of the
French Academy of Sciences; and in 1830, he was appointed to succeed
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the chair of natural history at the museum. Two years later, on the death of Cuvier, he obtained the chair of
comparative anatomy, of which he proved himself a worthy successor to his former teacher. In 1837, he was elected a foreign member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. On May 1, 1850, he died from an attack of
apoplexy in a railway carriage at the Embarcadère du Havre (current
Gare Saint-Lazare) in Paris. He was the
taxonomic authority of numerous zoological species, extinct and extant; including the eponymous
Blainville's beaked whale,
Mesoplodon densirostris. In the field of
herpetology, he adopted
Pierre André Latreille's proposal of separating
Amphibia from
Reptilia, and then (1816) developed a unique arrangement in regards to sub-groupings, using organs of generation as primary criteria. He described several new species of
reptiles. Blainville rejected evolution. He was a critic of
Lamarck's evolutionary ideas but similar to Lamarck proposed a
great chain of being. It was in 1822 that he coined the term
paleontology. == Taxa named in his honor ==