Philippe Taquet was born on 25 April 1940. He built his career studying dinosaur systematics, with a particular focus on fossil finds from northern Africa.[1]
Taquet is best known for his work at the Aptian-age site of Gadoufaoua in Niger, where he described new dinosaur species including the sail-backed iguanodontian Ouranosaurus. He also researched the Early Cretaceous stratigraphic relationship between western Africa and Brazil, reconstructing shared fossil floras and faunas from a time before the Atlantic had fully separated the two continents.[1]
He served as president of the French National Museum of Natural History from 1985 to 1990, and was a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 2004, serving as its president from 2012. In 2009 he received the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal for contributions to the history of geology. Taquet died on 16 November 2025 at age 85.[1]