François Pollen


François Paul Louis Pollen was a Dutch naturalist and merchant. He made major contributions to the study of the Malagasy fauna.

Biography

Pollen was born on 8 January 1842 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He had four siblings. His father M.P. Pollen was owner of the distillery M.P. Pollen & Zoon in Rotterdam. In 1862, he moved to Leiden to study medicine, but Hermann Schlegel encouraged him to study zoology. Together with his companion Douwe Casparus van Dam he made an expedition to Madagascar which lasted from November 1863 to July 1866. They collected insects, fish, birds, and mammals for the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden. Thanks to his wealth Pollen was able to finance this trip by himself. Subsequently, he also financed the field work of other naturalists on Madagascar without being directly involved. Further he collected animal and plant specimens on the Comoros and on the Mascarenes island of Réunion. In 1875 Pollen was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany.
Together with Hermann Schlegel he described the Madagascan fruit bat in 1866. In the same year he described the Réunion cuckooshrike and again with Schlegel the vanga genus Newtonia in 1868.
Pollen's name is commemorated in the specific epithets of the Comoros olive pigeon, the Pollen's vanga, the Mayotte chameleon, and the Madagascar coastal skink. He died on 7 May 1886 in The Hague, Netherlands.

Publications (selected)