title: Matthew Falder

text: Falder's offending dates back to 2007, where he committed voyeurism by secretly filming his university housemates in their shared bathroom. He would later inform a housemate about his offending, which she laughed off at the time.


title: Matthew Falder

text: Falders' online offending was detected as early as 2009. Falder manipulated young children to photograph themselves in compromising positions and then offered the images online. In April 2015, the NCA discovered someone posting to the hurtcore websites under the name "666devil", who later turned out to be Falder.


title: Matthew Falder

text: NCA officers arrested Falder in his office at his place of work on 21 June 2017. When they read out a list of the offences he was suspected of committing, Falder remarked that it sounded "like the rap sheet from hell".


title: Matthew Falder

text: Falder's victims numbered over 50, and it took over 30 minutes to read out the charges to him at Birmingham Crown Court. Originally charged with 188 offences, he pleaded not guilty to 51 of them; the prosecution accepted this, but they were ordered to remain on file. Falder used various accounts on several websites to pose as a young girl or woman named 'Liz'. On the dark web Falder used names such as 'inthegarden', '666devil' and 'evilmind'. Falder had seventy different online identities.


title: Matthew Falder

text: He lured people into taking photographs of themselves in humiliating situations. He blackmailed one person into raping a four-year-old child. Falder engaged in hurtcore, which police have characterised as manipulating others into performing acts of "rape, murder, sadism, torture, paedophilia, blackmail, humiliation and degradation". One of Falder's victims was just 14 years old; Falder said online he would willingly “mentally fuck her up” and added, “I am not sure I care if she lives or dies.” Falder increased the pressure on his victims, at least four of whom attempted suicide. When one of his victims pleaded for the abuse to end or else they would kill themselves, Falder replied that the images he already had on them would be circulated on the Internet anyway. Falder maintained he could not be caught and said he did not care if the victims lived or died.


title: Matthew Falder

text: In addition to the National Crime Agency (NCA), the investigation to uncover his identity involved GCHQ, US Homeland Security, Europol, Australian Federal Police, New Zealand Police, and the Israel Police; it lasted four years. Will Kerr of the NCA feels tech companies gave less than ideal cooperation with the police during the enquiry. Kerr maintains accounts were closed down possibly preventing police identifying other victims and identifying patterns of offending. Kerr fears this may have delayed identifying offenders and Kerr wants government action to make tech companies cooperate better in future. The NCA detailed crimes such as blackmailing people into eating faeces, licking toilet seats and tampons and persuading people to eat dog food. They described him as "one of the most prolific and depraved offenders they had ever encountered".


title: Matthew Falder

text: On 16 October 2017, Falder pleaded guilty to 137 offences against 46 victims, making him one of the most prolific sex offenders in British history. At Birmingham Crown Court on 19 February 2018, Judge Philip Parker sentenced Falder to 32 years in prison, and ordered him to serve a further 6 years on extended licence after his release. Falder will not be eligible for parole until he is at least 50 years old. If the Parole Board believes that Falder continues to pose a danger to the public or to children, he may have to serve the full 32 years in prison. The judge at the sentencing hearing described Falder as an "internet highwayman" who was "warped and sadistic" and whose behaviour was "cunning, persistent, manipulative and cruel." After sentencing, investigators released footage of his arrest and described how Falder "revelled" in the anguish and pain that he had caused.


title: Matthew Falder

text: Ruona Iguyovwe, of the CPS, said, “Matthew Falder is a highly manipulative individual who clearly enjoyed humiliating his many victims and the impact of his offending in this case has been significant. He deliberately targeted young and vulnerable victims. At least three victims are known to have attempted suicide and some others have inflicted self-harm. There was a high degree of sophistication and significant planning by Falder due to his use of encryption software and technology in his electronic communication and the use of multiple fake online identities and encrypted email addresses.” Prosecutors stated Falder lived a double life, a graduate of Cambridge University and Birmingham University researcher during the day and a sexual predator at night. Police officer Matt Sutton said, ‘In more than 30 years of law enforcement I’ve never come across an offender whose sole motivation was to inflict such profound anguish and pain. Matthew Falder revelled in it. I’ve also never known such an extremely complex investigation with an offender who was technologically savvy and able to stay hidden in the darkest recesses of the dark web. This investigation represents a watershed moment. Falder is not alone so we will continue to develop and deliver our capabilities nationally for the whole law enforcement system to stop offenders like him from wrecking innocent lives. I commend the victims for their bravery and I urge anyone who is being abused online to report it. There is help available.’


title: Matthew Falder

text: Javed Khan of Barnardo's stated, "This [32-year prison] sentence sends a message to paedophiles that they will pay for their crimes while, hopefully giving other child abuse victims the confidence to come forward and seek justice. (...) Barnardo’s wants to encourage parents to talk to their children about the potential dangers online and know what new apps they’re using and which websites they’re visiting, so they can help keep them safe. Barnardo’s also wants tech companies to sign up to an online code of practice to protect children, incorporate safety features when designing products and take action as soon as abuse becomes flagged. Children and young people need to know how to report abuse through age appropriate relationships and sex education."


title: Matthew Falder

text: Falder appealed against his sentence. On 16 October 2018, the Court of Appeal reduced the term of imprisonment to 25 years, with an extended licence of 8 years.


title: Matthew Falder

text: A spokesperson for the University of Birmingham said, "The University is shocked to hear of the abhorrent crimes committed by a former post-doctoral researcher.”


title: Matthew Falder

text: The University of Cambridge stated after the sentencing that they were "actively pursuing" ways of stripping Falder of his academic qualifications. The university could not say if there was a precedent of a removal process for its alumni.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Dương Văn Minh (; 16 February 19166 August 2001), popularly known as Big Minh, was a South Vietnamese politician and a senior general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and a politician during the presidency of Ngô Đình Diệm. In 1963, he became chief of a military junta after leading a coup in which Diệm was assassinated. Minh lasted only three months before being toppled by Nguyễn Khánh, but assumed power again as the fourth and last President of South Vietnam in April 1975, two days before surrendering to North Vietnamese forces. He earned his nickname "Big Minh", because at approximately 1.83 m (6 ft) tall and weighing 90 kg (198 lb), he was much larger than the average Vietnamese.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Born in Tiền Giang province in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam, Minh joined the French Army at the start of World War II, and was captured and tortured by the Imperial Japanese, who invaded and seized French Indochina. After his release, he joined the French-backed Vietnamese National Army (VNA) and was imprisoned by the communist-dominated Viet Minh before breaking out. In 1955, when Vietnam was partitioned and the State of Vietnam controlled the southern half under Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm, Minh led the VNA in decisively defeating the Bình Xuyên paramilitary crime syndicate in street combat and dismantling the Hòa Hảo religious tradition's private army. This made him popular with the people and Diệm, but the latter later put him in a powerless position, regarding him as a threat.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In 1963, the authoritarian Diệm became increasingly unpopular due to the Buddhist crisis and the ARVN generals decided to launch a coup, which Minh eventually led. Diệm was assassinated on 2 November 1963 shortly after being deposed. Minh was accused of ordering an aide, Nguyễn Văn Nhung, to kill Diệm. Minh then led a junta for three months, but he was an unsuccessful leader and was heavily criticized for being lethargic and uninterested. During his three months of rule, many civilian problems intensified and the communist Viet Cong made significant gains. Angered at not receiving his desired post, General Nguyễn Khánh led a group of similarly motivated officers in a January 1964 coup. Khánh allowed Minh to stay on as a token head of state in order to capitalize on Minh's public standing, but retained real power. After a power struggle, Khanh had Minh exiled. Minh stayed away before deciding to return and challenge General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in the presidential election of 1971. When it became obvious that Thieu would rig the poll, Minh withdrew and did not return until 1972, keeping a low profile.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh then advocated a "third force", maintaining that Vietnam could be reunified without a military victory to a hardline communist or anti-communist government. However, this was not something that Thiệu agreed with. In April 1975, as South Vietnam was on the verge of being overrun, Thieu resigned. A week later, Minh was chosen by the legislature and became president on 28 April. Saigon fell two days later on 30 April, and Minh ordered a surrender to prevent bloody urban street fighting. Minh was spared the lengthy incarceration meted out to South Vietnamese military personnel and civil servants, and lived quietly until being allowed to emigrate to France in 1983. He later moved to California, where he died.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh was born on 16 February 1916 in Mỹ Tho Province in the Mekong Delta, to a wealthy landowner who served in a prominent position in the Finance Ministry of the French colonial administration. He went to Saigon where he attended a top French colonial school, now Le Quy Don Highschool, where King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia also studied. Unlike many of his classmates, Minh declined French citizenship and joined the "Corps Indigène", the local component of the French colonial army.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: He began his military career in 1940, and was one of only 50 Vietnamese officers to be commissioned when he graduated from the "École Militaire" in France. During the 1940s, Imperial Japan invaded Indochina and seized control from France. Minh was captured and later had only a single tooth that remained from the torture he had suffered at the hands of the "Kempeitai" (Japanese military police). He always smiled displaying the single tooth, which he regarded as a symbol of his toughness.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh then transferred to the French-backed State of Vietnam's Vietnamese National Army in 1952. In 1954, Minh was captured by the Việt Minh. He escaped after strangling a communist guard and fighting off a few others.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In May 1955, he led VNA forces in the Battle of Saigon, when they dismantled the private army of the Bình Xuyên crime syndicate in urban warfare in the district of Chợ Lớn. With the Bình Xuyên vanquished, Diệm turned his attention to conquering the Hòa Hảo. As a result, a battle between Minh's VNA troops and Ba Cụt's men commenced in Cần Thơ on 5 June. Five Hòa Hảo battalions surrendered immediately; Ba Cụt and three remaining leaders had fled to the Cambodian border by the end of the month. The soldiers of the three other leaders eventually surrendered in the face of Minh's onslaught, but Ba Cụt's men fought to the end. Understanding that they could not defeat Minh's men in open conventional warfare, Ba Cụt's forces destroyed their own bases so that the VNA could not use their abandoned resources, and retreated into the jungle. Ba Cụt's 3,000 men spent the rest of 1955 evading the 20,000 VNA troops commanded by Minh. Ba Cụt was arrested by a patrol on 13 April 1956, and later executed, and his remaining forces were defeated by Minh.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: The victories over the Hòa Hảo and the Bình Xuyên were the zenith of Minh's battlefield career. When Minh arrived at a military parade in his jeep before the reviewing stand after the victories, Diệm embraced him and kissed both cheeks. He was particularly popular among the population of Saigon, having purged their city of the Bình Xuyên. This earned him the respect of US officials and he was sent to the United States to study, despite his poor English, at the US Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In November 1960, a coup attempt was made against Diệm. Minh, by this time disillusioned, did not come to Diệm's defense during the siege and instead stayed at his Saigon home. Diệm responded by appointing Minh to the post of Presidential Military Advisor, where he had no influence or troops to command in case the thought of coup ever crossed his mind. According to historian Howard Jones, Minh was "in charge of three telephones", and remained in the post until Diệm's overthrow.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh and Trần Văn Đôn, the ARVN Chief of Staff who had no troops due to Diệm's suspicion of him, went to observe the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)'s military exercises in Thailand, where they were informed about the regional disquiet over Diệm's policies toward Buddhists.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh frequently railed against Diệm in his September meeting with Lodge, decrying the police state that was being created by the Cần Lao Party of the Ngô family. Harkins reported that Minh "has done nothing but complain to me about the government and the way it is handled since I have been here". Harkins was skeptical about Minh's claims of widespread public disenchantment.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: During late-September, President Kennedy dispatched the McNamara Taylor mission to investigate the political and military situation in South Vietnam. This included investigating an ARVN coup. Minh expressed an interest in meeting McNamara and Taylor, so a game of doubles tennis was organized. McNamara watched on as Taylor played with Minh, giving "broad hints of our interest in other subjects which we gave him during breaks in the game". Minh revealed nothing of his thoughts about a possible coup, leaving his guests bewildered. Minh later messaged Taylor with a complaint about a perceived lack of support from Washington for a coup. Diệm became very unpopular during the Buddhist crisis of 1963; the US informed the Vietnamese generals (through the CIA) that it would not object if Diệm were to be overthrown. Minh was the second highest ranking general at the time, and he led the coup to overthrow Diệm on 1 November 1963.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In the afternoon, Minh ordered his bodyguard, Nguyễn Văn Nhung, to arrest, and later execute, Colonel Lê Quang Tung, one of Diệm's closest and most faithful associates. The generals hated Tung, because, at Ngô Đình Nhu's instructions, he had disguised his men in regular army uniforms and framed the army for the Xá Lợi Pagoda raids several months earlier, in August. At nightfall, Nhung took Tung and Major Lê Quảng Trịeu, his brother and deputy and drove them to the edge of the air base. Forced to kneel over two freshly dug holes, the brothers were shot into their graves and buried. In the early morning of 2 November, Diệm agreed to surrender. The ARVN officers had reportedly originally intended merely to exile Diệm and Nhu, having promised them safe passage".


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh and Đôn asked Colonel Lucien Conein to secure an American aircraft to take the brothers out of the country. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman recommended that if the generals decide to exile Diệm, he should also be sent outside Southeast Asia. He went on to anticipate what he termed a "Götterdämmerung in the palace".


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh then went to Gia Long Palace, and Minh sent an armored personnel carrier to transport Diệm and Nhu, while the others prepared for the ceremonial and televised handover of power to the junta. Minh arrived in full military ceremonial uniform to supervise the arrest of the Ngô brothers, only to find that they had escaped and humiliated him, having talked to him from a safe house. Minh was reported to be mortified when he realised that Diệm and Nhu had escaped in the middle of the night leaving the rebels to fight for an empty building. However, Diệm's hideout was found and surrounded, and Minh sent General Mai Hữu Xuân, his deputy Colonel Nguyễn Văn Quan, his bodyguard Nguyễn Văn Nhung and Dương Hiếu Nghĩa to arrest both brothers.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Nhung and Nghĩa sat with the brothers in the APC as the convoy headed off after the arrest. Before the convoy had departed for the church, Minh was reported to have gestured to Nhung, who was a contract killer and Minh's bodyguard, with two right-hand fingers. This was taken to be an order to kill both brothers. During the journey, the brothers were killed in the APC, with Nhung riddling their bodies with many bullets. An investigation by Đôn later determined that Nghĩa and Nhung sprayed them with bullets before repeatedly stabbing them. When the corpses arrived at military headquarters, the generals were shocked. Đôn ordered another general to tell reporters that the brothers had died in an accident and went to confront Minh in his office.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Đôn later reported that Minh had answered his question in a "haughty" tone. At this time, Xuân walked into Minh's office through the open door, unaware of Đôn's presence. Xuân snapped to attention and stated ""Mission accomplie"".


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh had his subordinates report that the Ngô brothers had committed suicide. Unclear and contradictory stories abounded on the exact method used by the brothers. Minh said "Due to an inadvertence, there was a gun inside the vehicle. It was with this gun that they committed suicide." Conein soon realized that the generals' story was false. Soon after, photos of the bloodied corpses of the brothers appeared in the media, discrediting the generals' lies. Đôn's assertion that the assassinations were unplanned proved sufficient for Lodge, who told the State Department that "I am sure assassination was not at their direction." Minh and Đôn reiterated their position in a meeting with Conein and Lodge a few days after the coup.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: The assassinations caused a split within the junta and repulsed world opinion. The killings damaged the public belief that the new regime would be an improvement over Diệm, throwing the generals into discord. Criticism over the killings caused the officers to battle one another for positions in the new government. The responsibility for the assassinations has generally been laid at the doorstep of Minh. Conein asserted that ""I have it on very good authority of very many people, that Big Minh gave the order"", as did William Colby, the director of the CIA's Far Eastern division. Đôn, however, was equally emphatic, saying ""I can state without equivocation that this was done by General Dương Văn Minh and by him alone."" Lodge believed Xuân was at least partly culpable, asserting: ""Diệm and Nhu had been assassinated, if not by Xuan personally, at least at his direction."" Some months after the event, Minh was reported to have privately told an American official that ""We had no alternative. They had to be killed. Diệm could not be allowed to live because he was too much respected among simple, gullible people in the countryside, especially the Catholics and the refugees. We had to kill Nhu because he was so widely feared — and he had created organizations that were arms of his personal power.""


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: When Nguyễn Văn Thiệu became president, Minh blamed him for the assassinations. In 1971, Minh claimed that Thiệu had caused the deaths by hesitating and delaying the attack by his 5th Division on Gia Long Palace. Đôn was reported to have pressured Thieu during the night of the siege, asking him on the phone "Why are you so slow in doing it? Do you need more troops? If you do, ask Đính to send more troops—and do it quickly because after taking the palace you will be made a general." Thiệu denied responsibility and issued a statement: ""Dương Văn Minh has to assume entire responsibility for the death of Ngô Đình Diệm.""


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Trần Văn Hương, an opposition politician who was jailed by Diệm, and a future prime minister and president, gave a scathing analysis of the generals' action. He said ""The top generals who decided to murder Diệm and his brother were scared to death. The generals knew very well that having no talent, no moral virtues, no political support whatsoever, they could not prevent a spectacular comeback of the president and Mr. Nhu if they were alive.""


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Conein asserted that Minh's humiliation by Diệm and Nhu was a major motivation for ordering their executions. Conein reasoned that the brothers were doomed to death once they escaped from the palace, instead of surrendering and accepting the offer of safe exile. Having successfully stormed the palace, Minh had arrived at the presidential residence in full ceremonial military uniform "with a sedan and everything else". Conein described Minh as a "very proud man" who had lost face by turning up at the palace, ready to claim victory, only to find an empty building. He claimed that Diệm and Nhu would not have been killed if they were in the palace, because there were too many people present.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: American policy makers later came to believe that the coup and the murders of President Diệm and his brother more deeply entrenched the United States in the war, by increasing its responsibility for what had occurred after the deposing of Diệm's administration.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In the view of Stanley Karnow<nowiki>, a former journalist in Saigon for The Saturday Evening Post, "Minh was not the main mover. But as the senior general, he was the man who crystallized the various factions who were all plotting against Diệm. Everybody and his brother had a plot."</nowiki>


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh took over the government under a military junta on 6 November, which consisted of 12 generals. To give the regime a civilian veneer, Diệm's figurehead Vice President, Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ, was appointed Prime Minister of a provisional civilian government overseen by the Military Revolutionary Council (MRC). Despite his nominally being the second most important person in the Diệm regime, Thơ was a figurehead with little influence, which lay with Diệm's brothers. Diệm held Thơ in contempt and did not allow him to take part in policy decisions. Tho entered into intensive bargaining with Minh on 2 November on the composition of the interim government. Thơ knew that the generals wanted to have him head a new government to provide continuity, and he used this as leverage in bargaining with them about the makeup of the cabinet. The Americans recognized Minh and immediately restored the aid programs and that had been cut to punish Diệm in the last days of his rule.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: With the fall of Diệm, various American sanctions that were imposed in response to the repression of the Buddhist crisis and Nhu's Special Forces' attacks on the Xá Lợi Pagoda, were lifted. The freeze on US economic aid, the suspension of the Commercial Import Program and various capital works initiatives were lifted, and Thơ and Minh were recognised. The first order of the new regime was Provisional Constitutional Act No. 1, signed by Minh, formally suspending the 1956 constitution created by Diệm. Minh was said to have preferred playing mah-jongg, playing tennis at the elite Cercle Sportif, tending to his garden and giving tea parties to fighting the Viet Cong or running the country. He was criticised for being lethargic and uninterested. Stanley Karnow said ""He was a model of lethargy, lacking both the skill and the inclination to govern"". According to Karnow, Minh lamented to him that because of his role as the junta head, he ""didn't have enough time to grow his orchids or play tennis"".


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Saigon newspapers, which Minh had allowed to re-open following the end of Diệm's censorship, reported that the junta was paralysed because all twelve generals in the MRC had equal power. Each member had the power of veto, enabling them to stonewall policy decisions. Thơ's civilian government was plagued by infighting. According to Thơ's assistant, Nguyễn Ngọc Huy, the presence of Generals Đôn and Đính in both the civilian cabinet and the MRC paralysed the governance process. Đính and Đôn were subordinate to Tho in the civilian government, but as members of the MRC they were superior to him. Whenever Thơ gave an order in the civilian hierarchy with which the generals disagreed, they would go to the MRC and make a counter-order.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: The press strongly attacked Thơ, accusing his civilian government of being "tools" of the MRC. Thơ's acquiescence to and corruption under Diệm's presidency was also called into question, and he was accused of helping to repress the Buddhists by Diệm and Nhu. Tho claimed that he had countenanced the pagoda raids, claiming that he would have resigned were it not for Minh's pleas to stay. Minh defended Thơ's anti-Diệm credentials by declaring that Tho had taken part in the planning of the coup "from the very outset" and that he enjoyed the "full confidence" of the junta.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: On 1 January 1964, a 'Council of Notables' comprising sixty leading citizens met for the first time, having been selected by Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo for Minh's junta. Its job was to advise the military and civilian wings of the government with a view towards reforming human rights, the constitution and the legal system. The council consisted almost entirely of professionals and academic leaders, with no representatives from the agricultural or labour movement. It soon became engaged in endless debate and never achieved its initial task of drafting a new constitution.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh and Thơ halted Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program. Nhu had trumpeted the program as the solution to South Vietnam's difficulties with Viet Cong insurgents, believing that the mass relocation of peasants into fortified villages would isolate the Viet Cong from their peasant support base. According to the junta, only 20% of the 8,600 existing strategic hamlets were under Saigon's control, with the rest having been taken over by the communists, contradicting Nhu's claims of widespread success. Those hamlets that were deemed to be tenable were consolidated, while the remainder were dismantled and their inhabitants returned to their ancestral land.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Under Minh's rule, there was a large turnover of officials aligned with Diệm. Many were indiscriminately arrested without charge, most of whom were later released. Đính and the new national police chief General Mai Hữu Xuân were given control of the interior ministry and were accused of arresting people en masse, before releasing them in return for bribes and pledges of loyalty. The government was criticised for firing large numbers of district and provincial chiefs directly appointed by Diệm, causing a breakdown in law and order during the abrupt transition of power.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: The provisional government lacked direction in policy and planning, resulting in its quick collapse. The number of rural attacks instigated by the Viet Cong surged in the wake of Diệm's deposal, due to the displacement of troops into urban areas for the coup. The increasingly free discussion generated from the surfacing of new and accurate data following the coup revealed that the military situation was far worse than what was reported by Diệm. The incidence of Viet Cong attacks continued to increase as it had done during the summer of 1963, the weapons loss ratio worsened and the rate of Viet Cong defections fell. The units that participated in the coup were returned to the field to guard against a possible major communist offensive in the countryside. The falsification of military statistics by Diệm's officials had led to miscalculations, which manifested themselves in military setbacks after Diệm's death.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: General Nguyễn Khánh began to plot against the MRC after it was created. Khánh expected a large reward for his part in the coup, but the other generals regarded him as untrustworthy and excluded him from the MRC. They further moved him to the command of the I Corps in the far north to keep him far away from Saigon. Khánh later claimed that he had built up intelligence infrastructure to weed out the Viet Cong under Diệm, but that Minh's MRC had disbanded it and released communist prisoners. Khánh was assisted by Generals Trần Thiện Khiêm, who controlled the forces around Saigon, Đỗ Mậu and Nguyễn Chánh Thi. Khánh and his colleagues spread rumours to American officials that Minh and his colleagues were about to declare South Vietnam's neutrality and sign a peace deal to end the war with the North.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Khánh overthrew Minh and his colleagues on 30 January 1964, in a bloodless coup, completely catching the MRC off guard. Minh, Đôn and Lê Văn Kim woke up to find hostile forces surrounding their houses and thought it to be a quixotic stunt by some disgruntled young officers.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Khánh used the coup to enact retribution against Minh, Đôn, Kim, Đính and Xuân. He had them arrested, claiming that they were part of a neutralist plot with the French. Khánh cited their service in the Vietnamese National Army in the early 1950s, under the French colonial administration as evidence, although he did as well. Khánh also had Major Nhung, the bodyguard of Minh, shot, causing riots among parts of the population who feared that Khánh would wind back the clock to the Diệm era. Khánh later persuaded Minh to remain as a figurehead head of state. This was partly due to pressure from American officials, who felt that the popular Minh would be a unifying and stabilising factor in the new regime. However, Khánh soon sidelined Minh.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh reportedly resented the fact that he had been deposed by a younger officer whom he viewed as an unscrupulous upstart. He was also upset with the detention of his fellow generals and around 30 of his junior officers. The junior officers were set free when Minh demanded that Khánh release them in return for his service. In the meantime, Khánh could not substantiate his claims against the generals.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Khánh presided over the trial, which took place in May. Minh was perfunctorily accused of misusing a small amount of money, before being allowed to serve as an advisor on the trial panel. The other generals were eventually asked by Khánh to "once you begin to serve again in the army, you do not take revenge on anybody". The tribunal then "congratulated" the generals, but found that they were of "lax morality", unqualified to command due to a "lack of a clear political concept" and confined to desk jobs. Khánh's actions left divisions among the officers of the ARVN. When Khánh was himself deposed in 1965, he handed over dossiers proving that Minh and the other generals were innocent. Robert Shaplen said that "the case … continued to be one of Khánh's biggest embarrassments".


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In August, Khánh drafted a new constitution, which would have augmented his personal power and hamstrung Minh of what authority he had left as well as ousting him from power. However, this only served to weaken Khánh as large urban demonstrations broke out, led by Buddhists, calling for an end to the state of emergency and the new constitution. In response to claims that he was harking back to the Diệm era of Roman Catholic domination, Khánh made concessions to the Buddhists, sparking opposition from Khiêm and Thiệu, both Catholics. They then tried to remove him in favour of Minh, and they recruited many officers. Khiêm and Thiệu sought out Taylor and sought a private endorsement to install Minh by staging a coup against Khánh, but the US ambassador did not want any more changes in leadership, fearing a corrosive effect on the government. This deterred Khiêm's group from staging a coup.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: The division among the generals came to a head at a meeting of the MRC on 26–27 August. Khánh and Khiêm blamed one another for the increasing unrest across the nation. Thiệu and another Catholic, General Nguyễn Hữu Có, called for the replacement of Khánh with Minh, but the latter refused. Minh reportedly claimed that Khánh was the only one who would get financial assistance from Washington, so they supported him, prompting Khiêm to angrily say, "Obviously, Khánh is a puppet of the U.S. government, and we are tired of being told by the Americans how we should run our internal affairs". Khánh said that he would resign, but no agreement over the leadership could be found, and after more arguing between the senior officers, on 27 August they agreed that Khánh, Minh, and Khiêm would rule as a triumvirate for two months, until a new civilian government could be formed. The trio then brought paratroopers into Saigon to end the rioting. However, the triumvirate did little due to their disunity. Khánh dominated the decision-making and sidelined Khiêm and Minh.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: On 13 September, Generals Lâm Văn Phát and Dương Văn Đức, both Roman Catholics demoted by Khánh after Buddhist pressure, launched a coup attempt with the support of Catholic elements. After a one-day stand-off the putsch failed. During the coup, Minh had remained aloof from the proceedings, angering Khánh and keeping their long-running rivalry going. By the end of October, the Johnson administration became more supportive of Taylor's negative opinion of Minh and concluded that US interests would be optimized if Khánh prevailed in the power struggle. As a result, the Americans eventually paid for Minh to go on a "good will tour" so that he could be pushed off the political scene without embarrassment, while Khiêm was exiled to Washington as an ambassador after being implicated in the coup.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: A short while earlier in September, before Minh was sent overseas, the junta decided to create a semblance of civilian rule by creating the High National Council (HNC), an appointed advisory body that was to begin the transitional to constitutional rule. Khánh put Minh in charge of picking the 17 members of the group, and he filled it with figures sympathetic to him. They then made a resolution to recommend a model with a powerful head of state, which would likely be Minh. Khánh did not want his rival taking power, so he and the Americans convinced the HNC to dilute the power inherent in the position to make it unappealing to Minh. The HNC then selected Phan Khắc Sửu as chief of state, and Sửu selected Trần Văn Hương as prime minister, although the junta remained the real power. By the end of the year, Minh was back in Vietnam after his tour.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Khánh and a group of younger officers decided to forcibly retire officers with more than 25 years of service, such as Minh and the other generals deposed in Khánh's January coup; nominally this was because they thought them to be lethargic and ineffective, but tacitly, and far more importantly, because they were potential rivals for power. According to Khánh and the Young Turks, this older group was led by Minh and had been crafting plots with the Buddhists to regain power.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Sửu's signature was required to pass the ruling, but he referred the matter to the HNC, which turned down the request. On 19 December, the generals dissolved the HNC; several of its members, other politicians and student leaders were arrested, while Minh and the other older generals were arrested and flown to Pleiku, and later removed from the military.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh went into exile in Bangkok, where he occupied himself with hobbies such as gardening and playing tennis. He still had many American friends, especially among the CIA, who gave him support during this period and paid for his dental bills. The US ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, was openly contemptuous of him and referred to him in public with obscenities. In return, he wrote a pro-war article for the respected "Foreign Affairs" quarterly in 1968, condemning the communists and rejecting a power-sharing agreement. This helped to end his exile, with the support of the United States.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh opposed General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who as part of the so-called "Young Turks" had meanwhile ended the endless power struggles and coups alongside Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, Nguyễn Chánh Thi and Chung Tấn Cang, by finally outmaneuvering Khánh in 1965, had been governing as constitutional President since 1967 and was permanently supported by the United States. Minh was going to run against Thiệu in the 1971 election but he withdrew because it became obvious to him (and most other observers) that the election would be rigged, due to a series of restrictions against would-be opponents. Thiệu was then the only candidate and retained power. Minh kept a low profile after this and was relatively politically inert.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh was regarded as a potential leader of a "third force" which could come to a compromise with the North that would allow eventual reunification without a military takeover by one of the parties. The North Vietnamese government carefully avoided either endorsing or condemning Minh, whose brother, Dương Văn Nhut, was a one-star general in the North Vietnamese army. In 1973, Minh proposed his own political program for Vietnam, which was a middle way between the proposals of Thiệu and the communists. Thiệu, however, reportedly opposed any compromise.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: In late April 1975, President Thiệu fled to Taiwan and handed over power to Vice President Trần Văn Hương on 21 April. Hương prepared for peace talks with North Vietnam. However, after his overtures were rejected, he resigned. As the main attack on Saigon developed on 27 April 1975, in a joint sitting of the bicameral National Assembly, the presidency was unanimously handed over to Minh, who was sworn in the following day. The French government thought that Minh could broker a cease-fire and had advocated his ascension to power. There was also an assumption that, as Minh had a reputation for indecision, the various groups thought that they could manipulate him for their own ends relatively easily. It was widely known that Minh had long-standing contacts with the communists, and it was assumed that he would be able to establish a cease-fire and re-open negotiations. This expectation was totally unrealistic, as the North Vietnamese were in an overwhelmingly dominant position on the battlefield and final victory was within reach, so they saw no need for power-sharing, regardless of any political changes in Saigon.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: On 28 April 1975, North Vietnamese forces fought their way into the outskirts of the capital. Later that afternoon, as President Minh finished his acceptance speech, in which he called for an immediate cease-fire and peace talks, a formation of five A-37s, captured from the South Vietnamese air force, bombed Tân Sơn Nhứt. As Biên Hòa fell, General Nguyễn Văn Toàn, the III Corps commander, fled to Saigon, saying that most of the top ARVN leadership had virtually resigned themselves to defeat. The inauguration of Minh had served as a signal to South Vietnamese officers who would not compromise with the communists. They began to pack up and leave, or commit suicide to avoid capture.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: PAVN columns advanced into the city center encountering very little resistance. Except in the Mekong Delta, where South Vietnamese military forces were still intact and aggressive, the South Vietnamese military had virtually ceased to exist. Just before 05:00 on 30 April, US Ambassador Martin boarded a helicopter and departed and at 07:53 the last Marines were evacuated from the US Embassy's rooftop. At 10:24, being advised by General Nguyễn Hữu Hạnh, President Minh went on Saigon Radio and ordered all South Vietnamese forces to cease fighting and later declared an unconditional surrender. He announced, "The Republic of Vietnam policy is the policy of peace and reconciliation, aimed at saving the blood of our people. We are here waiting for the Provisional Revolutionary Government to hand over the authority in order to stop useless bloodshed."


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: According to General Nguyen Huu Hanh's interview from BBC, President Duong Van Minh did not want to evacuate the Saigon government to Mekong Delta to continue military resistance. General Hanh also stated President Minh planned a peace to end the war.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Around noon, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace. When the communist troops entered the Independence Palace they found Minh and his cabinet sitting around the big oval table in the cabinet room, waiting for them. As they entered, Minh said "The revolution is here. You are here." He added, "We have been waiting for you so that we could turn over the government." The ranking North Vietnamese officer, Colonel Bùi Văn Tùng replied, "There is no question of your transferring power. Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have." Later in the afternoon, he went on radio again and said, "I declare the Saigon government is completely dissolved at all levels."


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: After his official surrender, he was summoned to report back. After a few days he was permitted to return to his villa, unlike almost all remaining military personnel and public servants, who were sent to re-education camps, often for over a decade in the case of senior officers. He lived there in seclusion for eight years, where he continued to raise birds and grow exotic orchids. It was assumed that Hanoi had resolved that as Minh had not actively opposed them in the final years of the war, he would be allowed to live in peace as long as he remained quiet and did not engage in political activities.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: Minh was allowed to emigrate to France in 1983 and settled near Paris, and it was again assumed that the communists had permitted him to leave on the basis that he remain aloof from politics and history. In the late 1980s, there was speculation he would be allowed to return to Vietnam to live out his last years, but this did not happen. In 1988, he emigrated to US, and he lived in Pasadena, California with his daughter, Mai Duong. He later needed a wheelchair for mobility. In exile, Minh kept his silence, did not talk about the events in Vietnam, and did not produce a memoir.


title: Dương Văn Minh

text: On 5 August 2001, Minh fell at his home in Pasadena, California. He was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, where he died the following night at the age of 85. He was buried in Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California. Minh's death was largely unmourned by overseas Vietnamese, who were still angry at him for ordering South Vietnamese soldiers to put their weapons down, and who saw him as the officer responsible for South Vietnam's fall.


title: Ron Ely

text: Ronald Pierce Ely (born June 21, 1938) is an American actor and novelist born in Hereford, Texas, and raised in Amarillo.


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely is best known for having portrayed Tarzan in the 1966–1968 NBC series "Tarzan" and for playing the lead role in the film "" (1975). He hosted the "Miss America" pageant telecast in 1980 and 1981.


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely won the role of Tarzan in 1966 after playing supporting roles in films such as "South Pacific" (1958), as an airplane navigator, "The Fiend Who Walked the West" (1958) and "The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker" (1959).


title: Ron Ely

text: During the filming of "Tarzan", Ely did virtually all of his stunts for the series, and suffered two dozen major injuries in the process, including two broken shoulders and various lion bites.


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely's height (6'4") and athletic build also won him the title role in the film "" (1975), as well as various guest shots. He was in five episodes of the series "Fantasy Island"; in one, in 1978, Ely portrayed Mark Antony in a Roman military short tunic and breastplate. Also in 1978, Ely starred in the "Wonder Woman" television series two-part episode "The Deadly Sting."


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely starred on the series "The Aquanauts" in 1960–1961, in the western adventure film "The Night of the Grizzly" (1966) opposite Clint Walker, and later appeared in Jürgen Goslar's slavery movie "Slavers" (1978). In the 1980s, he hosted the musical game show "Face the Music", as well as the 1980 and 1981 Miss America Pageants, replacing longtime host Bert Parks. Later in the decade, Ely starred in a 1987–1988 revival of the 1960s adventure series "Sea Hunt" as Mike Nelson, the role played by Lloyd Bridges in the original series.


title: Ron Ely

text: In the 1990s, Ely’s roles included a retired Superman from an alternative reality in the 1991 two-part episode "The Road to Hell" of the "Superboy" syndicated television series, and a big game hunter named Gordon Shaw in the 1992 episode "Tarzan the Hunted" of the syndicated "Tarzán" TV series (starring Wolf Larson). Until about 2001, Ely made appearances on such television shows as "Sheena" and "Renegade".


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely had retired from acting in 2001, but he returned to acting with an appearance in the television movie "Expecting Amish" (2014).


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely embarked on a professional writing career and has authored two published mystery novels featuring private eye Jake Sands: "Night Shadows" (1994) and "East Beach" (1995).


title: Ron Ely

text: Ely married his high school sweetheart Janet in 1959. Both natives of Hereford, Texas, they stayed together until their divorce in July 1961. He later married Miss Florida USA (1981), Valerie Lundeen and they had three children: Kirsten, Kaitland, and Cameron.


title: Ron Ely

text: On October 15, 2019, Valerie was found stabbed to death at the Hope Ranch residential community along the Santa Barbara coast where the couple lived; Ron was unharmed. Police were called to the scene for a "family disturbance", and a suspect identified as the couple's son Cameron was shot dead by police. In October 2020, Ely challenged the Santa Barbara District Attorney after the police's actions were described as justifiable homicide by the district attorney and no charges were filed against the deputies who were involved in the shooting.


title: Barney Martin

text: Barney Martin (March 3, 1923 – March 21, 2005) was an American actor, best known for playing Morty Seinfeld, father of Jerry, on the sitcom "Seinfeld" (1991-1998). He also played supporting roles in Mel Brooks' "The Producers" (1967), and the Dudley Moore comedy "Arthur" (1981). He also originated the role of Amos Hart (Mr. Cellophane) in the 1976 Broadway production of "Chicago".


title: Barney Martin

text: Born in New York City, Martin served in the U.S. Army Air Force as a navigator during the Second World War before working as an NYPD officer for twenty years, working his way up to detective. He got his start as a comedian while still a police officer, providing deputy commissioners with humorous presentations.


title: Barney Martin

text: Martin once commented that many Jewish "Seinfeld" fans told him how much his character reminded them of their fathers. Martin himself was from an Irish Catholic family.


title: Barney Martin

text: Entering show business as a stand-in for Jackie Gleason in "The Honeymooners" in 1955–56 and as a part-time writer for Steve Allen in the 1950s, he was discovered by Mel Brooks, who cast him in "The Producers". The next year, he played the role of Hank in "Charly". He went on to act in dozens of films, including the role of Liza Minnelli's unemployed father in the hit 1981 film "Arthur" and its 1988 sequel, "".


title: Barney Martin

text: On television, he appeared in two episodes of "The Odd Couple", once in a very early episode as an irate fellow juror infuriated with Felix Unger's pesty personality and four years later as a fellow subway train passenger. Shortly after, Martin co-starred with Tony Randall for two seasons in "The Tony Randall Show" as court reporter Jack Terwilliger. Throughout the run of this show, he had second billing only to Randall himself. In 1979, he was cast as the title character in Norman Lear's final TV series concept, "". Martin was cast to play a character similar to Lear's earlier creation, "Archie Bunker", but played as a dog. Only the pilot was completed. In 1990, he co-starred with Valerie Bertinelli and Matthew Perry in the CBS sitcom "Sydney". In 1987, he appeared in the pilot episode of "21 Jump Street" as Johnny Depp's partner. In 1993, Martin played the recurring role of "Pete Peters" on the Don Rickles sit-com "Daddy Dearest". Although he was the second actor to portray Jerry's dad, Morty, in the 90s sitcom "Seinfeld", he is the one most associated with the role, as the first actor, Phil Bruns, only appeared in one episode.


title: Barney Martin

text: In 1975, Martin originated the role of Amos Hart in the Broadway musical "Chicago", in which he introduced the song "Mr. Cellophane". He appeared in many more musicals during his career, most notably "South Pacific", "The Fantasticks", and "How Now, Dow Jones". Much of Martin's work has been in television, where he had a long career as a character actor. He played a gangster called the "Cheese Man" in a "Golden Girls" episode. He played a love interest for Thelma Harper in the Hawaii episode of "Mama's Family", and he played the father of Frank Fontana on "Murphy Brown". He appeared in an episode of "Full House" as Ranger Roy, the host of a popular kids' TV show. In 1981, he portrayed Ralph Marolla, father of Liza Minnelli's character in the film "Arthur" and the following year appeared on "Barney Miller" in the episode "Obituary".


title: Barney Martin

text: In 1990, Martin was cast as the fictional father of Jerry Seinfeld, Morty Seinfeld in the sitcom "Seinfeld". His first appearance was in season 2's "The Pony Remark". Martin replaced Phil Bruns who first portrayed the character in his first appearance in Season 1's "The Stake Out". He took on the role upon showrunners Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld deciding they wanted the character of Morty Seinfeld to be harsher, as they thought Bruns was too laid-back for the character. He retained this role until the series ended in 1998.


title: Barney Martin

text: On March 21, 2005, he died of bladder cancer in Studio City, Los Angeles, California, at age 82. He was cremated, and his ashes were returned to his family.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (; 23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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. Cuvier is also known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his "Essay on the Theory of the Earth" (1813) Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. In this way, Cuvier became the most influential proponent of catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century. His study of the strata of the Paris basin with Alexandre Brongniart established the basic principles of biostratigraphy.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Among his other accomplishments, Cuvier established that elephant-like bones found in North America belonged to an extinct animal he later would name as a mastodon, and that a large skeleton dug up in present-day Argentina was of "Megatherium", a giant, prehistoric ground sloth. He named the pterosaur "Pterodactylus", described (but did not discover or name) 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.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier is also remembered for strongly opposing theories of evolution, which at the time (before Darwin's theory) were mainly proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. 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. In 1830, Cuvier and Geoffroy engaged in a famous debate, which is said to exemplify the two major deviations in biological thinking at the time – whether animal structure was due to function or (evolutionary) morphology. Cuvier supported function and rejected Lamarck's thinking.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier also 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. Cuvier subjected Sarah Baartman to examinations alongside other French naturalists during a period in which she was held captive in a state of neglect. Cuvier examined Baartman shortly before her death, and conducted an autopsy following her death that disparagingly compared her physical features to those of monkeys.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's most famous work is "Le Règne Animal" (1817; English: "The Animal Kingdom"). In 1819, he was created a peer for life in honor of his scientific contributions. Thereafter, he was known as Baron Cuvier. He died in Paris during an epidemic of cholera. Some of Cuvier's most influential followers were Louis Agassiz on the continent and in the United States, and Richard Owen in Britain. His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier was born in Montbéliard, where his Protestant ancestors had lived since the time of the Reformation. His mother was Anne Clémence Chatel; his father, Jean George Cuvier, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards and a bourgeois of the town of Montbéliard. At the time, the town, which would be annexed to France on 10 October 1793, belonged to the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother, who was much younger than his father, tutored him diligently throughout his early years, so he easily surpassed the other children at school. During his gymnasium years, he had little trouble acquiring Latin and Greek, and was always at the head of his class in mathematics, history, and geography. According to Lee, "The history of mankind was, from the earliest period of his life, a subject of the most indefatigable application; and long lists of sovereigns, princes, and the driest chronological facts, once arranged in his memory, were never forgotten."


title: Georges Cuvier

text: At the age of 10, soon after entering the gymnasium, he encountered a copy of Conrad Gessner's "Historiae Animalium", the work that first sparked his interest in natural history. He then began frequent visits to the home of a relative, where he could borrow volumes of the Comte de Buffon's massive "Histoire Naturelle." All of these he read and reread, retaining so much of the information, that by the age of 12, "he was as familiar with quadrupeds and birds as a first-rate naturalist." He remained at the gymnasium for four years.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier spent an additional four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all of his coursework. Although he knew no German on his arrival, after only nine months of study, he managed to win the school prize for that language. Cuvier's German education exposed him to the work of the geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1750 - 1817), whose Neptunism and emphasis on the importance of rigorous, direct observation of three-dimensional, structural relationships of rock formations to geological understanding provided models for Cuvier's scientific theories and methods.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Upon graduation, he had no money on which to live as he awaited appointment to an academic office. So in July 1788, he took a job at Fiquainville chateau in Normandy as tutor to the only son of the Comte d'Héricy, a Protestant noble. There, during the early 1790s, he began his comparisons of fossils with extant forms. Cuvier regularly attended meetings held at the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics. There, he became acquainted with Henri Alexandre Tessier (1741–1837), who had assumed a false identity. Previously, he had been a physician and well-known agronomist, who had fled the Terror in Paris. After hearing Tessier speak on agricultural matters, Cuvier recognized him as the author of certain articles on agriculture in the "Encyclopédie Méthodique" and addressed him as M. Tessier.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Tessier replied in dismay, "I am known, then, and consequently lost."—"Lost!" replied M. Cuvier, "no; you are henceforth the object of our most anxious care." They soon became intimate and Tessier introduced Cuvier to his colleagues in Paris—"I have just found a pearl in the dunghill of Normandy", he wrote his friend Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. As a result, Cuvier entered into correspondence with several leading naturalists of the day, and was invited to Paris. Arriving in the spring of 1795, at the age of 26, he soon became the assistant of Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), who had been appointed to the chair of Animal Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. When Mertrud died in 1802, Cuvier replaced him in office and the Chair changed its name to Chair of Comparative Anatomy.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The Institut de France was founded in the same year, and he was elected a member of its Academy of Sciences. On 4 April 1796 he began to lecture at the École Centrale du Pantheon and, at the opening of the National Institute in April, he read his first paleontological paper, which subsequently was published in 1800 under the title "Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles". In this paper, he analyzed skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants, as well as mammoth fossils, and a fossil skeleton known at that time as the 'Ohio animal'.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's analysis established, for the first time, the fact that African and Indian elephants were different species and that mammoths were not the same species as either African or Indian elephants, so must be extinct. He further stated that the 'Ohio animal' represented a distinct and extinct species that was even more different from living elephants than mammoths were. Years later, in 1806, he would return to the 'Ohio animal' in another paper and give it the name, "mastodon".


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In his second paper in 1796, he described and analyzed a large skeleton found in Paraguay, which he would name "Megatherium". He 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.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Together, these two 1796 papers were a seminal or landmark event, becoming a turning point in the history of paleontology, and in the development of comparative anatomy, as well. They also greatly enhanced Cuvier's personal reputation and they essentially ended what had been a long-running debate about the reality of extinction.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In 1799, he succeeded Daubenton as professor of natural history in the "Collège de France". In 1802, he became titular professor at the "Jardin des Plantes"; and in the same year, he was appointed commissary of the institute to accompany the inspectors general of public instruction. In this latter capacity, he visited the south of France, but in the early part of 1803, he was chosen permanent secretary of the department of physical sciences of the Academy, and he consequently abandoned the earlier appointment and returned to Paris. In 1806, he became a foreign member of the Royal Society, and in 1812, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1812 he became a correspondent for the Royal Institute of the Netherlands, and became member in 1827. Cuvier was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.


title: Georges Cuvier

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


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In 1812, Cuvier made what the cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans called his "Rash dictum": he remarked that it was unlikely that any large animal remained undiscovered. Ten years after his death, the word "dinosaur" would be coined by Richard Owen in 1842.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: During his lifetime, Cuvier served as an imperial councilor under Napoleon, president of the Council of Public Instruction and chancellor of the university under the restored Bourbons, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and president of the Council of State under Louis Philippe. He 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.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier was by birth, education, and conviction a devout Lutheran, and remained Protestant throughout his life while regularly attending church services. Despite this, he regarded his personal faith as a private matter; he evidently identified himself with his confessional minority group when he supervised governmental educational programs for Protestants. He also 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, Cuvier was Grand Master of the Protestant Faculties of Theology of the French University.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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. He 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. A deep-rooted source of his opposition to the gradual transformation of species was his goal of creating an accurate taxonomy based on principles of comparative anatomy. Such a project would become impossible if species were mutable, with no clear boundaries between them. According to the University of California Museum of Paleontology, "Cuvier did not believe in organic evolution, for any change in an organism's anatomy would have rendered it unable to survive. He 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."


title: Georges Cuvier

text: He also observed that Napoleon's expedition to Egypt had retrieved animals mummified thousands of years previously that seemed no different from their modern counterparts. "Certainly", Cuvier wrote, "one cannot detect any greater difference between these creatures and those we see, than between the human mummies and the skeletons of present-day men."


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Lamarck dismissed this conclusion, arguing that evolution happened much too slowly to be observed over just a few thousand years. Cuvier, however, 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. Instead, he argued that one may judge what a long time would produce only by multiplying what a lesser time produces. Since a lesser time produced no organic changes, neither, he argued, would a much longer time. Moreover, his commitment to the principle of the correlation of parts caused him to doubt that any mechanism could ever gradually modify any part of an animal in isolation from all the other parts (in the way Lamarck proposed), without rendering the animal unable to survive. In his "Éloge de M. de Lamarck" ("Praise for M. de Lamarck"), Cuvier wrote that Lamarck's theory of evolution


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Instead, he said, the typical form makes an abrupt appearance in the fossil record, and persists unchanged to the time of its extinction. Cuvier attempted to explain this paleontological phenomenon he envisioned (which would be readdressed more than a century later by "punctuated equilibrium") and to harmonize it with the "Bible". He attributed the different time periods he was aware of as intervals between major catastrophes, the last of which is found in "Genesis".


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's claim that new fossil forms appear abruptly in the geological record and then continue without alteration in overlying strata was used by later critics of evolution to support creationism, to whom the abruptness seemed consistent with special divine creation (although Cuvier's finding that different types made their paleontological debuts in different geological strata clearly did not). The lack of change was consistent with the supposed sacred immutability of "species", but, again, the idea of extinction, of which Cuvier was the great proponent, obviously was not.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Many writers have unjustly accused Cuvier of obstinately maintaining that fossil human beings could never be found. In his "Essay on the Theory of the Earth", he did say, "no human bones have yet been found among fossil remains", but he made it clear exactly what he meant: "When I assert that human bones have not been hitherto found among extraneous fossils, I must be understood to speak of fossils, or petrifactions, properly so called". Petrified bones, which have had time to mineralize and turn to stone, are typically far older than bones found to that date. 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. He 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".


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The harshness of his criticism and the strength of his reputation, however, continued to discourage naturalists from speculating about the gradual transmutation of species, until Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" more than two decades after Cuvier's death.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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 quadrupeds. His first two such publications were those identifying mammoth and mastodon fossils as belonging to extinct species rather than modern elephants and the study in which he identified the "Megatherium" as a giant, extinct species of sloth. His primary evidence for his identifications of mammoths and mastodons as separate, extinct species was the structure of their jaws and teeth. His primary evidence that the "Megatherium" fossil had belonged to a massive sloth came from his comparison of its skull with those of extant sloth species.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier wrote of his paleontological method that "the form of the tooth leads to the form of the condyle, that of the scapula to that of the nails, just as an equation of a curve implies all of its properties; and, just as in taking each property separately as the basis of a special equation we are able to return to the original equation and other associated properties, similarly, the nails, the scapula, the condyle, the femur, each separately revel the tooth or each other; and by beginning from each of them the thoughtful professor of the laws of organic economy can reconstruct the entire animal." However, Cuvier's actual method was heavily dependent on the comparison of fossil specimens with the anatomy of extant species in the necessary context of his vast knowledge of animal anatomy and access to unparallelled natural history collections in Paris. This reality, however, did not prevent the rise of a popular legend that Cuvier could reconstruct the entire bodily structures of extinct animals given only a few fragments of bone.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: At the time Cuvier presented his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, it was still widely believed that no species of animal had ever become extinct. Authorities such as Buffon had claimed that fossils found in Europe of animals such as the woolly rhinoceros and the mammoth were remains of animals still living in the tropics (i.e. rhinoceros and elephants), which had shifted out of Europe and Asia as the earth became cooler.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Thereafter, Cuvier performed a pioneering research study on some elephant fossils excavated around Paris. The bones he studied, however, were remarkably different from the bones of elephants currently thriving in India and Africa. This discovery led Cuvier to denounce the idea that fossils came from those that are currently living. The idea that these bones belonged to elephants living – but hiding – somewhere on Earth seemed ridiculous to Cuvier, because it would be nearly impossible to miss them due to their enormous size. The "Megatherium" provided another compelling datapoint for this argument. Ultimately, his repeated identification of fossils as belonging to species unknown to man, combined with mineralogical evidence from his stratigraphical studies in Paris, drove Cuvier to the proposition that the abrupt changes the Earth underwent over a long period of time caused some species to go extinct.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's theory on extinction has met opposition from other notable natural scientists like Darwin and Charles Lyell. Unlike 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. This differed widely from Cuvier's theory, which seemed to propose that animal extinction was catastrophic.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: However, Cuvier's theory of extinction is still justified in the case of mass extinctions that occurred in the last 600 million years, when approximately half of all living species went completely extinct within a short geological span of two million years, due in part by volcanic eruptions, asteroids, and rapid fluctuations in sea level. At this time, new species rose and others fell, precipitating the arrival of human beings.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's early work demonstrated conclusively that extinction was indeed a credible natural global process. 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.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Influence on Cuvier's theory of extinction was his collection of specimens from the New World, many of them obtained from Native Americans. He also 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. He 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.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier came to believe that most, if not all, the animal fossils he examined were remains of species that had become extinct. Near the end of his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, he said:


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Contrary to many natural scientists' beliefs at the time, Cuvier believed that animal extinction was not a product of anthropogenic causes. Instead, he proposed that humans were around long enough to indirectly maintain the fossilized records of ancient Earth. He also attempted to verify the water catastrophe by analyzing records of various cultural backgrounds. Though he found many accounts of the water catastrophe unclear, he did believe that such an event occurred at the brink of human history nonetheless.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: This led Cuvier to become an active proponent of the geological school of thought called catastrophism, which maintained that many of the geological features of the earth and the history of life could be explained by catastrophic events that had caused the extinction of many species of animals. Over the course of his career, Cuvier came to believe there had not been a single catastrophe, but several, resulting in a succession of different faunas. He wrote about these ideas many times, in particular he discussed them in great detail in the preliminary discourse (an introduction) to a collection of his papers, "Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes" ("Researches on quadruped fossil bones"), on quadruped fossils published in 1812.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's own explanation for such a catastrophic event is derived from two different sources, including those from Jean-André Deluc and Déodat de Dolomieu. The former proposed that the continents existing ten millennia ago collapsed, allowing the ocean floors to rise higher than the continental plates and become the continents that now exist today. The latter proposed that a massive tsunami hit the globe, leading to mass extinction. Whatever the case was, he believed that the deluge happened quite recently in human history. In fact, he believed that Earth's existence was limited and not as extended as many natural scientists, like Lamarck, believed it to be.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Much of the evidence he used to support his catastrophist theories have been taken from his fossil records. He strongly suggested that the fossils he found were evidence of the world's first reptiles, followed chronologically by mammals and humans. Cuvier didn't wish to delve much into the causation of all the extinction and introduction of new animal species but rather focused on the sequential aspects of animal history on Earth. In a way, his chronological dating of Earth history somewhat reflected Lamarck's transformationist theories.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier also worked alongside Alexandre Brongniart in analyzing the Parisian rock cycle. Using stratigraphical methods, they were both able to extrapolate key information regarding Earth history from studying these rocks. These rocks contained remnants of mollusks, bones of mammals, and shells. From these findings, Cuvier and Brongniart concluded that many environmental changes occurred in quick catastrophes, though Earth itself was often placid for extended periods of time in between sudden disturbances.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The 'Preliminary Discourse' became very well known and, unauthorized translations were made into English, German, and Italian (and in the case of those in English, not entirely accurately). In 1826, Cuvier would publish a revised version under the name, "Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe" ("Discourse on the upheavals of the surface of the globe").


title: Georges Cuvier

text: After Cuvier's death, the catastrophic school of geological thought lost ground to uniformitarianism, as championed by Charles Lyell and others, which claimed that the geological features of the earth were best explained by currently observable forces, such as erosion and volcanism, acting gradually over an extended period of time. The increasing interest in the topic of mass extinction starting in the late twentieth century, however, has led to a resurgence of interest among historians of science and other scholars in this aspect of Cuvier's work.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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. They published a preliminary version in 1808 and the final version was published in 1811.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In this monograph they identified characteristic fossils of different rock layers that they used to analyze the geological column, the ordered layers of sedimentary rock, of the Paris basin. They concluded that the layers had been laid down over an extended period during which there clearly had been faunal succession and that the area had been submerged under sea water at times and at other times under fresh water. Along with William Smith's work during the same period on a geological map of England, which also used characteristic fossils and the principle of faunal succession to correlate layers of sedimentary rock, the monograph helped establish the scientific discipline of stratigraphy. It was a major development in the history of paleontology and the history of geology.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In 1800 and working only from a drawing, Cuvier was the first to correctly identify in print, a fossil found in Bavaria as a small flying reptile, which he named the "Ptero-Dactyle" in 1809, (later Latinized as "Pterodactylus antiquus")—the first known member of the diverse order of pterosaurs. In 1808 Cuvier identified a fossil found in Maastricht as a giant marine lizard, the first known mosasaur.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier speculated correctly that there had been a time when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant fauna. This speculation was confirmed over the two decades following his death by a series of spectacular finds, mostly by English geologists and fossil collectors such as Mary Anning, William Conybeare, William Buckland, and Gideon Mantell, who found and described the first ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and dinosaurs.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In a 1798 paper on the fossil remains of an animal found in some plaster quarries near Paris, Cuvier states what is known as the principle of the correlation of parts. He writes:


title: Georges Cuvier

text: This idea is referred to as Cuvier's principle of correlation of parts, which states that all organs in an animal's body are deeply interdependent. Species' existence relies on the way in which these organs interact. For example, a species whose digestive tract is best suited to digesting flesh but whose body is best suited to foraging for plants cannot survive. Thus in all species, the functional significance of each body part must be correlated to the others, else the species cannot sustain itself.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier believed that the power of his principle came in part from its ability to aid in the reconstruction of fossils. In most cases, fossils of quadrupeds were not found as complete, assembled skeletons, but rather as scattered pieces that needed to be put together by anatomists. To make matters worse, deposits often contained the fossilized remains of several species of animals mixed together. Anatomists reassembling these skeletons ran the risk of combining remains of different species, producing imaginary composite species. However, by examining the functional purpose of each bone and applying the principle of correlation of parts, Cuvier believed that this problem could be avoided.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: This principle's ability to aid in reconstruction of fossils was also helpful to Cuvier's work in providing evidence in favor extinction. The strongest evidence Cuvier could provide in favor of extinction would be to prove that the fossilized remains of an animal belonged to a species that no longer existed. By applying Cuvier's principle of correlation of parts, it would be easier to verify that a fossilized skeleton had been authentically reconstructed, thus validating any observations drawn from comparing it to skeletons of existing species.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In addition to helping anatomists reconstruct fossilized remains, Cuvier believed that his principle held enormous predictive power as well. For example, when he discovered a fossil that resembled a marsupial in the gypsum quarries of Montmartre, he correctly predicted that the fossil would contain bones commonly found in marsupials in its pelvis as well.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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 (1643 - 1727) and Antoine Lavoisier (1743 - 1794), respectively. He expressed confidence in the introduction to "Le Règne Animal" that some day 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. To him, the predictive capabilities of his principles demonstrated in his prediction of the existence of marsupial pelvic bones in the gypsum quarries of Montmartre demonstrated that these goals were not only in reach, but imminent.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The principle of correlation of parts was also Cuvier's way of understanding function in a non-evolutionary context, without invoking a divine creator. In the same 1798 paper on the fossil remains of an animal found in plaster quarries near Paris, Cuvier emphasizes the predictive power of his principle, writing,


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Today comparative anatomy has reached such a point of perfection that, after inspecting a single bone, one can often determine the class, and sometimes even the genus of the animal to which it belonged, above all if that bone belonged to the head or the limbs ... This is because the number, direction, and shape of the bones that compose each part of an animal's body are always in a necessary relation to all the other parts, in such a way that—up to a point—one can infer the whole from any one of them and vice versa.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Though Cuvier believed that his principle's major contribution was that it was a rational, mathematical way to reconstruct fossils and make predictions, in reality it was difficult for Cuvier to use his principle. The functional significance of many body parts were still unknown at the time, and so relating those body parts to other body parts using Cuvier's principle was impossible. Though Cuvier was able to make accurate predictions about fossil finds, in practice the accuracy of his predictions came not from application of his principle, but rather from his vast knowledge of comparative anatomy. However, despite Cuvier's exaggerations of the power of his principle, the basic concept is central to comparative anatomy and paleontology.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: At the Paris Museum, Cuvier furthered his studies on the anatomical classification of animals. He believed that classification should be based on how organs collectively function, a concept he called functional integration. Cuvier reinforced the idea of subordinating less vital body parts to more critical organ systems as part of anatomical classification. He included these ideas in his 1817 book, "The Animal Kingdom".


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In his anatomical studies, Cuvier believed function played a bigger role than form in the field of taxonomy. His scientific beliefs rested in the idea of the principles of the correlation of parts and of the conditions of existence. The former principle accounts for the connection between organ function and its practical use for an organism to survive. The latter principle emphasizes the animal's physiological function in relation to its surrounding environment. These findings were published in his scientific readings, including "Leçons d'anatomie comparée" ("Lessons on Comparative Anatomy") between 1800 and 1805, and "The Animal Kingdom" in 1817.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Ultimately, Cuvier developed four embranchements, or branches, through which he classified animals based on his taxonomical and anatomical studies. He later performed groundbreaking work in classifying animals in vertebrate and invertebrate groups by subdividing each category. For instance, he proposed that the invertebrates could be segmented into three individual categories, including "Mollusca", "Radiata", and "Articulata". He also articulated that species cannot move across these categories, a theory called transmutation. He reasoned that organisms cannot acquire or change their physical traits over time and still retain optimal survival. As a result, he often conflicted with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theories of transmutation.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In 1798, Cuvier published his first independent work, the "Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux", which was an abridgment of his course of lectures at the École du Pantheon and may be regarded as the foundation and first statement of his natural classification of the animal kingdom.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier categorized snails, cockles, and cuttlefish into one category he called molluscs ("Mollusca"), an embranchment. Though he noted how all three of these animals were outwardly different in terms of shell shape and diet, he saw a noticeable pattern pertaining to their overall physical appearance.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier began his intensive studies of molluscs during his time in Normandy – the first time he had ever seen the sea – and his papers on the so-called "Mollusca" began appearing as early as 1792. However, most of his memoirs on this branch were published in the "Annales du museum" between 1802 and 1815; they were subsequently collected as "Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'anatomie des mollusques", published in one volume at Paris in 1817.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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. Cuvier's work on this project extended over the years 1828–1831.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In palaeontology, 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.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Among living forms he published papers relating to the osteology of the "Rhinoceros Indicus", the tapir, "Hyrax capensis", the hippopotamus, the sloths, the manatee, etc.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: He produced an even larger body of work on fossils, dealing with the extinct mammals of the Eocene beds of Montmartre and other localities near Paris, such as the Buttes Chaumont, the fossil species of hippopotamus, "Palaeotherium", a marsupial (which he called "Didelphys gypsorum"), the "Megalonyx", the "Megatherium", the cave-hyena, the pterodactyl, the extinct species of rhinoceros, the cave bear, the mastodon, the extinct species of elephant, fossil species of manatee and seals, fossil forms of crocodilians, chelonians, fish, birds, etc. If his identification of fossil animals was dependent upon comparison with the osteology of extant animals whose anatomy was poorly known, Cuvier would often publish a thorough documentation of the relevant extant species' anatomy before publishing his analyses of the fossil specimens. The department of palaeontology dealing with the Mammalia may be said to have been essentially created and established by Cuvier.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The results of Cuvier's principal palaeontological and geological investigations ultimately were given to the world in the form of two separate works: "Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes" (Paris, 1812; later editions in 1821 and 1825); and "Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe" (Paris, 1825). In this latter work he expounded a scientific theory of Catastrophism.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier's most admired work was his "Le Règne Animal". It appeared in four octavo volumes in 1817; a second edition in five volumes was brought out in 1829–1830. In this classic work, Cuvier presented the results of his life's research into the structure of living and fossil animals. With the exception of the section on insects, in which he was assisted by his friend Latreille, the whole of the work was his own. It was translated into English many times, often with substantial notes and supplementary material updating the book in accordance with the expansion of knowledge.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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. Some writers who have studied his racial work have dubbed his position as "quasi-polygenist", and most of his racial studies have influenced scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). Cuvier claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian, the original race of mankind. The other two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors then living in complete isolation from each other.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: 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. Cuvier's racial studies held the supposed features of polygenism, namely fixity of species; limits on environmental influence; unchanging underlying type; anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races; physical and mental differences between distinct races.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Alongside other French naturalists, Cuvier subjected Sarah Baartman, a South African Khokhoi woman exhibited in European freak shows as the "Hottentot Venus", to examinations. At the time that Cuvier interacted with Baartman, Baartman's "existence was really quite miserable and extraordinarily poor. Sara was literally [sic] treated like an animal." In 1815, while Baartman was very ill, Cuvier commissioned a nude painting of her. She died shortly afterward, aged 26.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Following Baartman's death, Cuvier sought out and received permission to dissect her body, focusing on her genitalia, buttocks and skull shape. In his examination, Cuvier concluded that many of Baartman's features more closely resembled the anatomy of a monkey than a human. Her remains were displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1970, then were put into storage. Her remains were returned to South Africa in 2002.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Apart from his own original investigations in zoology and paleontology 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. Thus, in 1808 he was placed by Napoleon upon the council of the Imperial University, and in this capacity he presided (in the years 1809, 1811, and 1813) over commissions charged to examine the state of the higher educational establishments in the districts beyond the Alps and the Rhine that had been annexed to France, and to report upon the means by which these could be affiliated with the central university. He published three separate reports on this subject.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In his capacity, again, of perpetual secretary of the Institute, he not only prepared a number of "éloges historiques" on deceased members of the Academy of Sciences, but was also the author of a number of reports on the history of the physical and natural sciences, the most important of these being the "Rapport historique sur le progrès des sciences physiques depuis 1789", published in 1810.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Prior to the fall of Napoleon (1814) he had been admitted to the council of state, and his position remained unaffected by the restoration of the Bourbons. He was elected chancellor of the university, in which capacity he acted as interim president of the council of public instruction, whilst he also, as a Lutheran, superintended the faculty of Protestant theology. In 1819 he was appointed president of the committee of the interior, an office he retained until his death.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: In 1826 he was made grand officer of the Legion of Honour; he subsequently was appointed president of the council of state. He served as a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1830 to his death. A member of the Doctrinaires, he was nominated to the ministry of the interior in the beginning of 1832.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier is commemorated in the naming of several animals; they include Cuvier's beaked whale (which he first thought to be extinct), Cuvier's gazelle, Cuvier's toucan, Cuvier's bichir, Cuvier's dwarf caiman, and "Galeocerdo cuvier" (tiger shark). Cuvier is commemorated in the scientific name of the following reptiles: "Anolis cuvieri" (a lizard from Puerto Rico), "Bachia cuvieri" (a synonym of "Bachia alleni)", and "Oplurus cuvieri".


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The fish Hepsetus cuvieri, sometimes known as the African pike or Kafue pike characin, which is a predatory freshwater fish found in southern Africa was named after him.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: There also are some extinct animals named after Cuvier, such as the South American giant sloth "Catonyx cuvieri".


title: Georges Cuvier

text: The professor of English Wayne Glausser argues at length that the Aubrey-Maturin series of 21 novels (1970–2004) by Patrick O'Brian make the character Stephen Maturin "an advocate of the neo-classical paradigm articulated .. by Georges Cuvier."


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier is referenced in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as having written a description of the orangutan. Arthur Conan Doyle also refers to Cuvier in "The Five Orange Pips", in which Sherlock Holmes compares Cuvier's methods to his own.


title: Georges Cuvier

text: Cuvier also collaborated on the "Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles" (61 volumes, 1816–1845) and on the "" (45 volumes, 1843-18??)


title: Frigatebird

text: Frigatebirds are a family of seabirds called Fregatidae which are found across all tropical and subtropical oceans. The five extant species are classified in a single genus, Fregata. All have predominantly black plumage, long, deeply forked tails and long hooked bills. Females have white underbellies and males have a distinctive red gular pouch, which they inflate during the breeding season to attract females. Their wings are long and pointed and can span up to , the largest wing area to body weight ratio of any bird.


title: Frigatebird

text: Able to soar for weeks on wind currents, frigatebirds spend most of the day in flight hunting for food, and roost on trees or cliffs at night. Their main prey are fish and squid, caught when chased to the water surface by large predators such as tuna. Frigatebirds are referred to as kleptoparasites as they occasionally rob other seabirds for food, and are known to snatch seabird chicks from the nest. Seasonally monogamous, frigatebirds nest colonially. A rough nest is constructed in low trees or on the ground on remote islands. A single egg is laid each breeding season. The duration of parental care is among the longest of any bird species; frigatebirds are only able to breed every other year.


title: Frigatebird

text: The Fregatidae are a sister group to Suloidea which consists of cormorants, darters, gannets, and boobies. Three of the five extant species of frigatebirds are widespread (the magnificent, great and lesser frigatebirds), while two are endangered (the Christmas Island and Ascension Island frigatebirds) and restrict their breeding habitat to one small island each. The oldest fossils date to the early Eocene, around 50 million years ago. Classified in the genus "Limnofregata", the three species had shorter, less-hooked bills and longer legs, and lived in a freshwater environment.


title: Frigatebird

text: The term "Frigate Bird" itself was used in 1738 by the English naturalist and illustrator Eleazar Albin in his "A Natural History of the Birds". The book included an illustration of the male bird showing the red gular pouch. Like the genus name, the English term is derived from the French mariners' name for the bird "la frégate"—a frigate or fast warship. The etymology was mentioned by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre when describing the bird in 1667.