Pierre Belon, L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux, Paris: Gilles Corrozet, 1555, pp. 40-41, coloured woodcut, Rel.a.55.5.

Pierre Belon (1517-1564) was trained as an apothecary and served important patrons such as Guillaume Duprat, bishop of Clermont, René du Bellay, bishop of Le Mans, François, Cardinal de Tournon, and Charles IX, King of France. Between 1546 and 1550, he travelled through Greece, Asia, Judaea, Egypt, and Arabia, and published worked on fishes, plants as well as birds. In his L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux, in which he attempts a morphological classification of birds, Belon draws a comparison between the skeletal structure of a human and a bird. This work is an indication of how anatomical investigation was extended to the study of animals in general.