Who is georges cuvier

Appel, Toby. Desmond, Adrian. London Outram, Dorinda. Manchester Rudwick, Martin J. Georges Cuvier , leader of elite French science. Statue of Cuvier on the rear wall of the Royal Academy, London [Click on image for larger picture] Cuvier's scientific achievements are difficult to overestimate. It was widely recounted that he could reconstruct a skeleton based on a single bone. His work is considered the foundation of vertebrate palaeontology.

Cuvier expanded Linneaun taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla. Cuvier arranged both fossils and living species in this taxonomy. In fact, he was quite adamantly opposed to the evolutionary theory proposed by his colleague, Jean Baptiste Lamarck.

Cuvier believed that the organs and bones of an animal were so finely attuned that they could not be altered in any way beneficial to the animal. Cuvier preferred to believe that the earth had been swept clean of life numerous times by catastrophic geological revolutions, with each repopulation unrelated to the one that preceded it.

Pterodactyl fossil in situ , from Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossils , 2nd ed. Our portrait is the frontispiece to his Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe , which is essentially the introduction to the Researchs on Fossil Bones , published separately and reprinted many times as a popular introduction to his ideas of progressionism, the replacement of earlier animal forms by revolution rather than evolution.

Plesiosaurus skeleton in situ , from Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossils , 2nd ed. William B. Ashworth, Jr. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw umkc. When fossil remains were found that were unlike anything living at the time, some scientists argued that they were unusual examples of living creatures, or that animals known only from fossils must still survive in some unexplored part of the world.

There were a few naturalists who believed that animals or plants of which only fossil remains could be found did indeed represent forms that no longer existed. But it was only at the end of the 18th century that the great French paleontologist and anatomist Georges Cuvier was able to demonstrate convincingly that extinctions were real.

Much of Cuvier's research produced knowledge that would ultimately support Darwin's theory of evolution, although Cuvier himself did not realize it. He was the first to demonstrate that the different strata of rock in the Paris basin each had its own mammal fauna. Furthermore, he showed that the lower a stratum was, the more different its fossil animals were from species living in the present. Yet Cuvier rejected the idea of organic evolution.

He was an essentialist, convinced that plants and animals of all types were created for their particular roles and places in the world's environment, and that they were unchanging throughout their existence.