Giclee reprint of an original lithograph from Jules Sebastian Cesar Dumont D'Urville’s, Voyage au pole sud et dans l'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zélée. This multi-volume scientific chronicle published by Gide in Paris between 1841 and 1854 documents one of France's final historic maritime expeditions. Commissioned by King Louis-Philippe and spanning from 1837 to 1840, the voyage challenged British and American polar dominance by successfully charting the Antarctic mainland, which Dumont d’Urville famously named Adélie Land after his wife. Beyond its geographical triumphs, the mission served as an immense victory for natural history, deploying a specialized team of scientists and artists who gathered thousands of unfamiliar specimens across the Pacific and Southeast Asia. These biological findings were systematically compiled into extensive text volumes and a stunning Mammifères atlas starting in 1841, providing 19th-century Europe with its first highly authoritative, anatomically precise illustrations of remote global wildlife.

This specific plate from the Mammifères atlas combined the marine expertise of shipboard artist Louis Le Breton with the strict anatomical precision of museum painter Jean-Charles Werner. Published under the technical direction of Borromée and engraved onto metal by the skilled printmaker Oudet, the artwork delivers an empirical, highly realistic depiction of an adult female Halicore dugong (dugong) that successfully avoided the exaggerated, mythological traits common in earlier maritime accounts.

The rendering meticulously captures the animal's signature downward-sloping muzzle—an evolutionary adaptation for grazing on shallow seagrass beds—and features the distinct, whale-like fluked tail that differentiates it from the rounded paddle of a manatee. By presenting a clean, authoritative standard of the specimen collected during the expedition's voyage through Southeast Asia, this plate provided European naturalists with the precise visual data needed to firmly separate ancient "mermaid" folklore from the biological reality of marine sirenians.