Perrault was the leader of a team of comparative anatomists that included Guichard Joseph Duverney, Jean Pecquet, Moyse Charas and Philippe de la Hire; they were often called the “Parisians” in contemporary literature because of their membership in the Académie Royale des Sciences. Their investigations began with a thresher shark and lion from the royal menagerie and went on to encompass forty-nine vertebrate species. “Although some of the discoveries on which the Parisians most prided themselves—including the nictitating membrane that Perrault first observed in a cassowary, the external lobation of the kidneys in the bear, and the castoreal glands of the beaver—had been observed earlier, no such detailed and exact descriptions and illustrations had been published before” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). In the spirit of rationalism, Perrault and his team investigated and debunked many popular myths attached to certain species, such as the legend that salamanders live in fire or that chameleons subsist on air. They also recorded their methods of work along with their results, providing the only contemporary disclosure of how such anatomical research was conducted in the seventeenth century. The Mémoires were originally issued in two parts in 1671 and 1676; they were later reissued in 1676 (with slight changes) as one volume with a new title-leaf. The two volumes of the Mémoires contain descriptions of twenty-nine species, including the lion, the chameleon, the shark, the lynx, the porcupine, the eagle, the cormorant and the ostrich.