Maurice Taieb (born 1935) is a French geologist and paleoanthropologist.
He discovered the Hadar formation, recognized its potential importance to paleoanthropology and founded the International Afar Research Expedition (IARE).
This enabled co-director Donald Johanson to discover an early hominin fossil, the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecine Lucy in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression .