Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (28 January 1858 – 16 December 1940, pronunciation: , roughly , was a
Dutch paleoanthropologist and geologist. He earned worldwide fame for his discovery of
Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated
Homo erectus), or "
Java Man". Although hominid fossils had been found and studied before, Dubois was the first anthropologist to embark upon a purposeful search for them.