French Lazarist missionary, Catholic priest, zoologist, botanist, and traveller, also known as Père David (“Father David”), who found remarkable animals hitherto-unknown to Europe such as the giant panda in Baoxing County in China and Père David’s deer.
Ordained in 1862, he was shortly afterwards sent to Beijing, where he began a collection of material for a museum of natural history, mainly zoological, but in which botany, geology, and palaeontology were also well represented.
At the request of the French government, important specimens from his collection were sent to Paris and aroused the greatest interest. The Jardin des Plantes commissioned him to undertake scientific journeys through China to make further collections. He succeeded in obtaining many specimens of hitherto unknown animals and plants, and the value of his comprehensive collections for the advance of systematic zoology and especially for the advancement of animal geography received universal recognition from the scientific world.
He had found in China all together 200 species of wild animals, of which 63 were hitherto unknown to zoologists, and 807 species of birds, 65 of which had not been described before. He made a large collection of reptiles, amphibians, and fishes and handed it over to specialists for further study. Père David’s Rat Snake (Elaphe davidi) was named in his honour by Henri Émile Sauvage in 1884. Also, a large number of moths and insects, many of them hitherto unknown, were brought to the museum of the Jardin des Plantes.
He died on 10 November 1900, aged 74, in Paris.

Link to Wikipedia biography