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Extinctions: Georges Cuvier. By the 1700s, fossils had been inducted into the living world. Instead of being produced by rocks themselves, fossils were recognized as the remains of animals or plants. They looked too much like particular living species to be anything else.
Georges Cuvier's 1812 skeletal reconstruction of Anoplotherium commune. The stratigraphy and lack of modern analogue in the extinct mammal was proof of extinction and ecological succession. Early in his tenure at the National Museum in Paris, Cuvier published studies of fossil bones in which he argued that they belonged to large, extinct ...
May 9, 2024 · Meanwhile, Cuvier also applied his views on the correlation of parts to a systematic study of fossils that he had excavated. He reconstructed complete skeletons of unknown fossil quadrupeds. These constituted astonishing new evidence that whole species of animals had become extinct.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Georges Cuvier is regarded as the father of paleontology. He convinced a skeptical scientific world of the reality of species extinction. He used comparative anatomy, a science he pioneered, to reconstruct extinct animals – for example, he established from drawings that a fossil he named pterodactyl was a flying reptile.
May 21, 2018 · Cuvier made rigorous comparisons between all these fossil bones and the skeletons of extant species in the great collections at the museum. In a long series of papers (1804–1810) in the new Annales du Muséum, he claimed that the fossils were distinct, and argued that they all belonged to extinct species or even genera.
Dec 9, 2020 · In 1812, Georges Cuvier, the incomparable anatomist at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, produced the first comprehensive book to be published on the history of fossil tetrapods...
