Louis Antoine Marie Joseph Dollo (1857-1931) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

-born Belgian palaeontologist, known for formulating Dollo's law

Dollo's law

Dollo's law of irreversibility is a hypothesis proposed in 1893 by French-born Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo which states that evolution is not reversible...

. He graduated as an engineer at École Centrale de Lille

École Centrale de Lille

Located in the campus of the University of Lille in France, École Centrale de Lille is a renowned Graduate Engineering school, with roots back to 1854 as the École des arts industriels et des mines de Lille, re-organised in 1872 as Institut industriel du Nord.It is one of the Centrale Graduate...

 in France. In 1878, he supervised the excavation of the famous, multiple Iguanodon

Iguanodon

Iguanodon is a genus of ornithopod dinosaur that lived roughly halfway between the first of the swift bipedal hypsilophodontids and the ornithopods' culmination in the duck-billed dinosaurs...

find, at Bernissart

Bernissart

Bernissart is a Walloon municipality located in the Belgian province of Hainaut. On January 1, 2006 Bernissart had a total population of 11,458. The total area is 43.42 km², which gives a population density of 264 inhabitants per km²....

, Belgium. Recently, the stochastic Dollo model is being used to analyze matrix of cognates statistically. In linguistics, this model permits newly coined cognate to arise only once on a tree languages.