81 Facts About Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification.

Georges Cuvier established two ungulate genera from the Paris Basin named Palaeotherium and Anoplotherium based on fragmentary remains alone, although more complete remains were later uncovered.

Georges Cuvier named the pterosaur Pterodactylus, described the aquatic reptile Mosasaurus, and was one of the first people to suggest the earth had been dominated by reptiles, rather than mammals, in prehistoric times.

Georges Cuvier is remembered for strongly opposing theories of evolution, which at the time were mainly proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Georges Cuvier believed there was no evidence for evolution, but rather evidence for cyclical creations and destructions of life forms by global extinction events such as deluges.

Georges Cuvier conducted racial studies which provided part of the foundation for scientific racism, and published work on the supposed differences between racial groups' physical properties and mental abilities.

Georges Cuvier subjected Sarah Baartman to examinations alongside other French naturalists during a period in which she was held captive in a state of neglect.

Georges Cuvier examined Baartman shortly before her death, and conducted a dissection following her death that disparagingly compared her physical features to those of monkeys.

Georges Cuvier died in Paris during an epidemic of cholera.

Georges Cuvier's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic Georges Cuvier was born in Montbeliard, where his Protestant ancestors had lived since the time of the Reformation.

Georges Cuvier's mother was Anne Clemence Chatel; his father, Jean-Georges Cuvier, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards and a bourgeois of the town of Montbeliard.

Georges Cuvier then began frequent visits to the home of a relative, where he could borrow volumes of the Comte de Buffon's massive Histoire Naturelle.

Georges Cuvier spent an additional four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all of his coursework.

Georges Cuvier regularly attended meetings held at the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics.

When Mertrud died in 1802, Georges Cuvier replaced him in office and the Chair changed its name to Chair of Comparative Anatomy.

Georges Cuvier concluded this skeleton represented yet another extinct animal and, by comparing its skull with living species of tree-dwelling sloths, that it was a kind of ground-dwelling giant sloth.

Georges Cuvier was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.

Georges Cuvier then devoted himself more especially to three lines of inquiry: the structure and classification of the Mollusca; the comparative anatomy and systematic arrangement of the fishes; fossil mammals and reptiles and, secondarily, the osteology of living forms belonging to the same groups.

In 1812, Georges Cuvier made what the cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans called his "Rash dictum": he remarked that it was unlikely that any large animal remained undiscovered.

Georges Cuvier was eminent in all these capacities, and yet the dignity given by such high administrative positions was as nothing compared to his leadership in natural science.

Georges Cuvier was by birth, education, and conviction a devout Lutheran, and remained Protestant throughout his life while regularly attending church services.

Georges Cuvier was very active in founding the Parisian Biblical Society in 1818, where he later served as a vice president.

From 1822 until his death in 1832, Georges Cuvier was Grand Master of the Protestant Faculties of Theology of the French University.

Georges Cuvier was critical of theories of evolution, in particular those proposed by his contemporaries Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which involved the gradual transmutation of one form into another.

Georges Cuvier repeatedly emphasized that his extensive experience with fossil material indicated one fossil form does not, as a rule, gradually change into a succeeding, distinct fossil form.

Georges Cuvier studied the mummified cats and ibises that Geoffroy had brought back from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, and showed they were no different from their living counterparts; Cuvier used this to support his claim that life forms did not evolve over time.

Georges Cuvier observed that Napoleon's expedition to Egypt had retrieved animals mummified thousands of years previously that seemed no different from their modern counterparts.

Georges Cuvier in turn criticized how Lamarck and other naturalists conveniently introduced hundreds of thousands of years "with a stroke of a pen" to uphold their theory.

Georges Cuvier attempted to explain this paleontological phenomenon he envisioned and to harmonize it with the Bible.

Georges Cuvier attributed the different time periods he was aware of as intervals between major catastrophes, the last of which is found in Genesis.

The lack of change was consistent with the supposed sacred immutability of "species", but, again, the idea of extinction, of which Georges Cuvier was the great proponent, obviously was not.

Georges Cuvier's point was that all human bones found that he knew of, were of relatively recent age because they had not been petrified and had been found only in superficial strata.

Georges Cuvier was not dogmatic in this claim, however; when new evidence came to light, he included in a later edition an appendix describing a skeleton that he freely admitted was an "instance of a fossil human petrifaction".

Early in his tenure at the National Museum in Paris, Georges Cuvier published studies of fossil bones in which he argued that they belonged to large, extinct quadrupeds.

At the time Georges Cuvier presented his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, it was still widely believed that no species of animal had ever become extinct.

Thereafter, Georges Cuvier performed a pioneering research study on some elephant fossils excavated around Paris.

Unlike Georges Cuvier, they didn't believe that extinction was a sudden process; they believed that like the Earth, animals collectively undergo gradual change as a species.

Georges Cuvier's thinking on extinctions was influenced by his extensive readings in Greek and Latin literature; he gathered every ancient report known in his day relating to discoveries of petrified bones of remarkable size in the Mediterranean region.

Georges Cuvier maintained an archive of Native American observations, legends, and interpretations of immense fossilized skeletal remains, sent to him by informants and friends in the Americas.

Georges Cuvier was impressed that most of the Native American accounts identified the enormous bones, teeth, and tusks as animals of the deep past that had been destroyed by catastrophe.

Georges Cuvier came to believe that most, if not all, the animal fossils he examined were remains of species that had become extinct.

Contrary to many natural scientists' beliefs at the time, Georges Cuvier believed that animal extinction was not a product of anthropogenic causes.

Georges Cuvier attempted to verify the water catastrophe by analyzing records of various cultural backgrounds.

Georges Cuvier wrote about these ideas many times, in particular, he discussed them in great detail in the preliminary discourse to a collection of his papers, Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupedes, on quadruped fossils published in 1812.

Georges Cuvier strongly suggested that the fossils he found were evidence of the world's first reptiles, followed chronologically by mammals and humans.

Georges Cuvier worked alongside Alexandre Brongniart in analyzing the Parisian rock cycle.

In 1826, Georges Cuvier published a revised version under the name, Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe.

Georges Cuvier collaborated for several years with Alexandre Brongniart, an instructor at the Paris mining school, to produce a monograph on the geology of the region around Paris.

In 1808 Georges Cuvier identified a fossil found in Maastricht as a giant marine lizard, the first known mosasaur.

Georges Cuvier speculated correctly that there had been a time when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant fauna.

Georges Cuvier believed that the power of his principle came in part from its ability to aid in the reconstruction of fossils.

However, by examining the functional purpose of each bone and applying the principle of correlation of parts, Georges Cuvier believed that this problem could be avoided.

The strongest evidence Georges Cuvier could provide in favour of extinction would be to prove that the fossilized remains of an animal belonged to a species that no longer existed.

Georges Cuvier hoped that his principles of anatomy would provide the law-based framework that would elevate natural history to the truly scientific level occupied by physics and chemistry thanks to the laws established by Isaac Newton and Antoine Lavoisier, respectively.

Georges Cuvier expressed confidence in the introduction to Le Regne Animal that someday anatomy would be expressed as laws as simple, mathematical, and predictive as Newton's laws of physics, and he viewed his principle as an important step in that direction.

The functional significance of many body parts was still unknown at the time, and so relating those body parts to other body parts using Georges Cuvier's principle was impossible.

At the Paris Museum, Georges Cuvier furthered his studies on the anatomical classification of animals.

Georges Cuvier believed that classification should be based on how organs collectively function, a concept he called functional integration.

Georges Cuvier reinforced the idea of subordinating less vital body parts to more critical organ systems as part of anatomical classification.

Georges Cuvier included these ideas in his 1817 book, The Animal Kingdom.

Ultimately, Georges Cuvier developed four embranchements, or branches, through which he classified animals based on his taxonomical and anatomical studies.

Georges Cuvier later performed groundbreaking work in classifying animals in vertebrate and invertebrate groups by subdividing each category.

Georges Cuvier articulated that species cannot move across these categories, a theory called transmutation.

Georges Cuvier reasoned that organisms cannot acquire or change their physical traits over time and still retain optimal survival.

Georges Cuvier categorized snails, cockles, and cuttlefish into one category he called molluscs, an embranchment.

Georges Cuvier's researches on fish, begun in 1801, finally culminated in the publication of the Histoire naturelle des poissons, which contained descriptions of 5,000 species of fishes, and was a joint production with Achille Valenciennes.

In palaeontology, Georges Cuvier published a long list of memoirs, partly relating to the bones of extinct animals, and partly detailing the results of observations on the skeletons of living animals, specially examined with a view toward throwing light upon the structure and affinities of the fossil forms.

Georges Cuvier was a Protestant and a believer in monogenism, who held that all men descended from the biblical Adam, although his position usually was confused as polygenist.

Georges Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian, Mongolian, and the Ethiopian.

Georges Cuvier claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian, the original race of mankind.

Georges Cuvier categorized these divisions he identified into races according to his perception of the beauty or ugliness of their skulls and the quality of their civilizations.

Alongside other French naturalists, Georges Cuvier subjected Sarah Baartman, a South African Khokhoi woman exhibited in European freak shows as the "Hottentot Venus", to examinations.

Georges Cuvier's remains were displayed in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until 1970, then were put into storage.

Georges Cuvier's remains were returned to South Africa in 2002.

Apart from his own original investigations in zoology and paleontology Georges Cuvier carried out a vast amount of work as perpetual secretary of the National Institute, and as an official connected with public education generally; and much of this work appeared ultimately in a published form.

Georges Cuvier was elected chancellor of the university, in which capacity he acted as interim president of the council of public instruction, while he, as a Lutheran, superintended the faculty of Protestant theology.

Georges Cuvier served as a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1830 to his death.

Georges Cuvier is commemorated in the scientific name of the following reptiles: Anolis cuvieri, Bachia cuvieri, and Oplurus cuvieri.

Georges Cuvier is referenced in Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue as having written a description of the orangutan.

Georges Cuvier collaborated on the Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles and on the Biographie universelle.