Georges Cuvier

Born: August 23, 1769; Montbéliard, France
Died: May 13, 1832; Paris, France
Fields of study: Anatomy, paleontology, zoology
George Cuvier studied at the Académie Caroline in Stuttgart from1784 to 1788. In 1795, he was invited to Paris by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, where he was appointed as a professor of animal anatomy at the French National Museum of Natural History. After dissecting and studying many large animals, Cuvier concluded that organisms are functional wholes, in which the form and function of each part is integrated into the entire body. Each part of an organism bears signs of the entire organism. Thus, any change in an organism’s anatomy would render it unable to survive. Consequently, Cuvier did not believe in organic evolution. Based on rational principles and his knowledge of the comparative anatomy of living organisms, Cuvier reconstructed a number of organisms from fragmentary fossils. His studies led him to believe that any similarities between organisms were due to common functions, not to common ancestry. Paradoxically, some of his findings were later used to help support the theory of evolution. During Cuvier’s lifetime, some scientists interpreted fossils as remains of living species. Others thought that the unusual organismsknownas fossils must still survive in unexplored parts of the world. Many could not believe that God would allow any species to become extinct. Cuvier published detailed studies about elephant anatomy showing that the African and Indian elephants were distinct species and that the fossil mammoths of Europe and Siberia were different from any living elephant species. He also published documentation of the past existence of large mammals, including the ground sloth, the Irish elk, and the American mastodon, that resembled no living species. Through these studies, Cuvier established the fact that some animal species had become extinct. The results of his studies, such as his Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe (1825; discourse on the revolutions of the globe), launched the field of modern vertebrate paleontology. Cuvier believed that the Earth was very old and that periodic upheavals, rather than the inability of a species to adapt, had annihilated a number of species. Heviewed the upheavals as catastrophic events produced by natural causes that were linked to geological conditions, including the periodic rise and fall of sea level. As a result, Cuvier inferred that extinctions of species documented by the fossil record were the result of abrupt changes that caused the strata of the continents to be dislocated and folded. Eventually, the theory of catastrophism was supplanted in favor of uniformitarianism. However, in addition to the slower natural processes suggested by uniformitarianism, the Earth has also been shaped by occasional catastrophic events, which appear to be the source of major extinctions of animal species.