Nathanaël Maury is a French herpetologist, citizen scientist photographer, explorer, and autodidact naturalist whose life’s work forms the living heart of Taxa Naturae — the ambitious, urgent project of recording all life on Earth before it vanishes.

Born in 1983 in the Ain department of eastern France and raised near Bourg-en-Bresse, Nathanael grew up already watching ants and bees, catching lizards and geckos, and seizing his first Natrix natrix (snake) at the age of eight behind the family garden. Extreme sports — speed skating, sailing, climbing, downhill mountain biking, canoeing, judo — filled his early adulthood, yet nature remained the constant pull. Parallel to professional photography (weddings, events, beauty portrait) and industrial maintenance technician, he kept and bred reptiles at home, designing computer-controlled bioclimatic cages that precisely recreated rain, wind, UV and infrared light, humidity, and vegetation. He succeeded where many failed, including with the difficult Morelia nauta and  Morelia tracyae, proving that when animals are given truly suitable conditions, they thrive and reproduce.

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This practical mastery of living systems led him, around 2013, to Alligator Bay near Mont-Saint-Michel, where he built large-scale bioclimatic enclosures for snakes and lizards. Soon afterward he expatriated to Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Singapore, then Laos — managing wild-animal and turtle conservation farms while ranging ever farther into primary forests. By 2015 the central vision of Taxa Naturae had crystallized: there existed no exhaustive photographic documentation of the world’s herpetofauna even as species disappeared daily. Nathanael set out to create it.

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Working as a field naturalist and technical innovator, he has produced more than four thousand high-resolution identification plates of reptiles and amphibians across twenty-four countries. Each plate is a modern naturalist’s sheet — multiple standardized views, extreme detail, and scientific rigor — destined for a comprehensive encyclopedia of herpetofauna. Documentary series such as Traqueur de serpents (broadcast on Canal+) have followed him into the field across 11 countries. You can also find him on YouTube under the name Nathanaël Maury.

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TAXA NATURÆ does not stop at reptiles and amphibians. Confronted with the vast unknown of insects — roughly a million described, several million still unnamed, and thousands vanishing before they are ever seen — Nathanaël applied the same technical intensity to micro-photography. In collaboration with the Institut Pasteur du Cambodge, he assembled a unique imaging system: motorized rails stepping at 200 nanometers, magnetic-levitation tables that eliminate vibration, modified flashes, and focus-stacking sequences of thousands of frames that resolve structures at 0.3 µm. The resulting images of mosquitoes, midges, and other insects are among the most detailed ever made. Two twin studios now operate, one in Laos and one in Phnom Penh, with the method freely shared rather than patented.

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Nathanael’s conviction is stark and Linnaean in spirit: we still know almost nothing of the taxa that surround us. At current rates of description it would take centuries simply to name the insects, while extinction races ahead. Taxa Naturae is therefore both archive and alarm — a systematic photographic and morphological record of Earth’s living diversity that begins with herpetofauna and the microscopic, yet deliberately expands to plants, fungi, mushrooms, orchids, fish and birds. Leaves, flowers, bark, roots and ephemeral fruiting bodies; the intricate labellum and pollinia of orchids; the scale patterns and fin morphology of fish; the plumage and soft-part colours of birds — all are captured with the same multi-view precision, so that every photographed form may still be named, studied, and, if possible, saved before the invisible disappears.

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Today based in Laos, Nathanael continues to fund field work and technical posts from his conservation-farm salary, refusing to privatize knowledge that belongs to the living world itself. In the tradition that began with Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, he is building, plate by plate and pixel by pixel, a twenty-first-century TAXA NATURÆ: the visual inventory of all life on Earth, made  before the invisible disappears forever.