Louis Roule

Who was Louis Roule?

Louis Roule was a French zoologist born in Marseille.

In 1881 he obtained a degree in natural sciences at Marseille, followed by his doctorate of sciences at Paris with a thesis on ascidians of coastal Provence. From 1885 he worked as a lecturer at the faculty of sciences in Toulouse, where in 1892 he became a professor. During the previous year, he earned a doctorate in medicine.

In 1910 he succeeded Léon Vaillant as chair of zoology at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, a position he would hold until 1937. During this time period he was also an instructor at the Institut National Agronomique, and director of the laboratory of ichthyology at the École pratique des hautes études.

Roule's early research dealt largely with invertebrates. Later his focus turned to ichthyology, of which he had the opportunity to take inventory of large collections of marine specimens. He analyzed collections gathered from Prince Albert I of Monaco, as well as specimens obtained from the Antarctic expeditions of Jean-Baptiste Charcot. Roule was the first scientist to describe Grimaldichthys profundissimus, a fish species found at a depth of over six kilometers.