 These disciplines played key roles in the development of a more technically sophisticated form of natural history.One of the first and most important examples was the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which was at the center of many of the developments in natural history during the first decades of the 19th century.It was founded in 1793 by an act of the French National Assembly, and was based on an extensive royal collection plus the private collections of aristocrats confiscated during the French revolution, and expanded by material seized in French military conquests during the Napoleonic Wars.