Michèle de Saint Laurent

Michèle de Saint Laurent (December 9, 1926 – July 11, 2003) was a French carcinologist. She spent most of her career at the in Paris, working on the systematics of decapod crustaceans; her major contributions were to hermit crabs and Thalassinidea, and she also co-described Neoglyphea, a living fossil discovered in 1975.

Biography Michèle de Saint Laurent was born on December 9, 1926, at Fontainebleau, near Paris. Her father, an army officer, retired on grounds of ill health in 1938 and moved with his family to Plestin-les-Grèves in Brittany; he died in 1939. During the Second World War, Michèle's mother concealed British airmen from the Nazi regime, for which she was convicted in 1942 by a military tribunal and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1944. She and Jacques Forest realised that it represented a living relative of the Glypheoidea, a group previously thought to have been extinct since the Eocene.

De Saint Laurent's later work included a new classification of crabs (involving the recognition of a new section, Eubrachyura), and three new superfamilies (Axioidea, Enoplometopoidea and Retroplumoidea), as well as various works on the decapods of hydrothermal vents.