Georges Cuvier Georges Cuvier, Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe Without a doubt, Georges Cuvier possessed one of the finest minds in history. Almost single-handedly, he founded vertebrate paleontology as a scientific discipline and created the comparative method of organismal biology, an incredibly powerful tool. It was Cuvier who firmly established the fact of the extinction of past lifeforms. He contributed an immense amount of research in vertebrate and invertebrate zoology and paleontology, and also wrote and lectured on the history of science. Biography of Cuvier Cuvier was born on August 23, 1769, at Montbéliard, a French-speaking community in the Jura Mountains that was not under French jurisdiction at the time; it was ruled by the Duke of Württemberg. Cuvier studied at a school which the Duke had founded, the Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart, from 1784 to 1788.

He then took a position as tutor to a noble family in Normandy, which kept him out of the way of the worst of the violence of the French Revolution; there he was named to a position in the local government and began to make his reputation as a naturalist. In 1795, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire invited him to come to Paris; he was appointed an assistant, and shortly thereafter a professor of animal anatomy, at the newly reformed Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). Cuvier stayed at his post when Napoleon came to power, and was appointed to several government positions, including Inspector-General of public education and State Councillor, by Napoleon. Cuvier continued as a state councillor under three successive Kings of France; he thus accomplished the almost unbelievable feat of serving under three different, opposing French governments (Revolution, Napoleonic, and monarchy) and dying in his bed. All the while, Cuvier lectured and did research at the Musée National, amazing his colleagues with his energy and devotion to science. By the time of his death he had been knighted and made a Baron and a Peer of France.

Cuvier's Scientific Thought Cuvier saw organisms as integrated wholes, in which each part's form and function were integrated into the entire body. No part could be modified without impairing this functional integration: . .. the component parts of each must be so arranged as to render possible the whole living being, not only with regard to itself, but to its surrounding relations, and the analysis of these conditions frequently leads to general laws, as demonstrable as those which are derived from calculation or experiment. 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 that they were no different from their living counterparts; Cuvier used this to support his claim that lifeforms did not evolve over time. Organisms were functional wholes; any change in one part would destroy the delicate balance. But the functional integration of organisms meant that each part of an organism, no matter how small, bore signs of the whole. Thus it was possible to reconstruct organisms from fragmentary remains, based on rational principles.

Cuvier had a legendary ability to reconstruct organisms from fragmentary fossils, and many of his reconstructions turned out to be strikingly accurate. However, in practice, he based his reconstructions less on rational principles than on his deep knowledge of comparative anatomy of living organisms. Cuvier's insistence on the functional integration of organisms led him to classify animals into four "branches," or embranchements: Vertebrata , Articulata ( arthropods and segmented worms ), Mollusca (which at the time meant all other soft, bilaterally symmetrical invertebrates), and Radiata ( cnidarians and echinoderms ). For Cuvier, these embranchements were fundamentally different from each other and could not be connected by any evolutionary transformation. Any similarities between organisms were due to common functions, not to common ancestry: function determines form, form does not determine function. Cuvier's ideas led him to oppose the theories of his contemporaries, such as Buffon , Lamarck , and Geoffroy St. Hilaire , who suggested that animal morphology might be much more changeable and be affected by environmental conditions.

They pointed to vestigial, functionless structures and to embryonic development to show that dissimilar organisms with different functions might nonetheless share a common structural plan. Cuvier and Geoffroy engaged in a famous public debate over their different philosophies in 1830, at the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. While Cuvier is generally said to have won the debate, the views of Geoffroy continued to be perpetuated in scientific circles, and the repercussions of this debate on form versus function can still be felt in modern biology. Perhaps Cuvier's most crucial and longest-lasting contribution to biology was establishing extinction as a fact. For over a century before Cuvier, fossils had been accepted as the remains of once-living organisms, as scientists like Leonardo da Vinci and Robert Hooke had stated.

Some scientists believed that many fossils represented life forms that no longer existed: Buffon , for instance, wrote prophetically that "We have monuments taken from the bosom of the Earth, especially from the bottom of coal and slate mines, that demonstrate to us that some of the fish and plants that these materials contain do not belong to species currently existing." But others who had studied fossils could not believe that God, having created all things and pronounced them good, would allow any of them to be wiped out. Some scientists interpreted fossils as remains of living species: fossil mammoths found in Italy were interpreted as the remains of the elephants brought by Hannibal when he invaded Rome. Others thought that the unusual organisms then known only as fossils must still survive in unexplored parts of the world -- no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, speculated that mammoths might yet be found living in the American wilderness. While speculation raged, the detailed information needed to solve the problem had never been collected.

As Cuvier stated in 1796 before the National Institute of Sciences and Arts in Paris, concerning fossil elephants: It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary information to solve some of them. The studies of elephant bones published up until now contain so little detail that even today a scientist cannot say whether they belong to one or another of our living species, and of the enormous quantity of fossil bones about which so many writers have spoken, we have good drawings of only two or three. Cuvier went on to publish detailed studies of elephant anatomy that showed not only that the African and Indian elephants were distinct species, but that the fossil mammoths of Europe and Siberia were different from either living elephant species. The picture at left, from his paper of 1798, clearly shows the differences between the lower jaw of a fossil mammoth (top) and of a living Indian elephant (bottom) (click on the image to view an enlarged version).

Cuvier went on to publish the results of study after study documenting the past existence of large mammals that resembled no living species: the giant ground sloth, the Irish elk , the American mastodon, and many others. With these studies, Cuvier launched modern vertebrate paleontology. What had happened to these great beasts of the past? Cuvier believed that the Earth was immensely old, and that for most of its history conditions had been more or less like those of the present. However, periodic "revolutions", or catastrophes (a word which Cuvier avoided because of its quasi-supernatural overtones) had befallen the Earth; each one wiped out a number of species. Cuvier regarded these "revolutions" as events with natural causes, and considered their causes and natures to be an important geological problem. Although he was a lifelong Protestant, Cuvier did not explicitly identify any of these "revolutions" with Biblical or historical events. However, some later geologists, notably Rev. William Buckland in England, suggested that the most recent revolution was the Biblical Flood.

This remained a popular hypothesis until Louis Agassiz (who had studied with Cuvier) showed that the "flood deposits" were actually formed by glaciers. Cuvier's theory of "revolutions" was later supplanted by uniformitarian theories, notably those of Lyell. However, with the increased interest in mass extinctions and their causes, catastrophes have re-emerged as valid hypotheses for at least some of the great episodes of change in the Earth's biota, such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event . Certainly Cuvier's realization that extinction is real was a great advance for science. Furthermore, Cuvier's integration of organismal function into the study of form would prove to be a powerful tool for biologists. In a sense, modern evolutionary thought has synthesized both Cuvier's views and those of his opponents into a coherent whole. The Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle , where Cuvier worked and lectured, is accessible on the WWW.

Georges Cuvier | French zoologist | Britannica.com French zoologist Alternative Title: Georges-Léopold-Chrétien-Frédéric-Dagobert, Baron Cuvier Georges Cuvier Georges Cuvier, in full Georges-Léopold-Chrétien-Frédéric-Dagobert, Baron Cuvier (born August 23, 1769, Montbéliard [now in France]—died May 13, 1832, Paris , France), French zoologist and statesman, who established the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. Georges Cuvier, detail of a portrait by Mathieu Ignace Van Brée, 1798. Courtesy of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris Cuvier was born in Montbéliard , a town attached to the German duchy of Württemberg until the 1790s, when it passed to France .

In 1784–88 Cuvier attended the Académie Caroline (Karlsschule) in Württemberg’s capital, Stuttgart , where he studied comparative anatomy and learned to dissect. After graduation Cuvier served in 1788–95 as a tutor, during which time he wrote original studies of marine invertebrates, particularly the mollusks. His notes were sent to Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire , a professor of zoology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and at Geoffroy’s urging Cuvier joined the staff of the museum. For a time the two scientists collaborated , and in 1795 they jointly published a study of mammalian classification, but their views eventually diverged. Cuvier refused an invitation to become a naturalist on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798–1801, preferring to remain at the museum to continue his research in comparative anatomy . His first result, in 1797, was Tableau élémentaire de l’histoire naturelle des animaux (“Elementary Survey of the Natural History of Animals”), a popular work based on his lectures.

In 1800–05, he published his Leçons d’anatomie comparée (“Lessons on Comparative Anatomy”). In this work, based also on his lectures at the museum, he put forward his principle of the “correlation of parts,” according to which the anatomical structure of every organ is functionally related to all other organs in the body of an animal , and the functional and structural characteristics of organs result from their interaction with their environment . Moreover, according to Cuvier, the functions and habits of an animal determine its anatomical form, in contrast to Geoffroy, who held the reverse theory—that anatomical structure preceded and made necessary a particular mode of life. Cuvier also argued that the anatomical characteristics distinguishing groups of animals are evidence that species have not changed since the Creation. Each species is so well coordinated, functionally and structurally, that it could not survive significant change. He further maintained that each species was created for its own special purpose and each organ for its special function.

In denying evolution , Cuvier disagreed with the views of his colleague Jean-Baptiste Lamarck , who published his theory of evolution in 1809, and eventually also with Geoffroy, who in 1825 published evidence concerning the evolution of crocodiles. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent Cuvier advanced rapidly. While continuing his zoological work at the museum, he brought about major reforms in education. He served as imperial inspector of public instruction and assisted in the establishment of French provincial universities. For those services he was granted the title chevalier in 1811. He also wrote the Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles depuis 1789, et sur leur état actuel (“Historical Report on the Progress of the Sciences…”), published in 1810. His publications are lucid expositions of the European science of his time. Meanwhile, Cuvier also applied his views on the correlation of parts to a systematic study of fossils that he had excavated. He reconstructed complete skeletons of unknown fossil quadrupeds. These constituted astonishing new evidence that whole species of animals had become extinct.

Furthermore, he discerned a remarkable sequence in the creatures he exhumed. The deeper, more remote strata contained animal remains—giant salamanders, flying reptiles, and extinct elephants—that were far less similar to animals now living than those found in the more recent strata. He summarized his conclusions, first in 1812 in his Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (“Researches on the Bones of Fossil Vertebrates”), which included the essay “Discours préliminaire” (“Preliminary Discourse”), as well as in the expansion of this essay in book form in 1825, Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe (“Discourse on the Revolutions of the Globe”). All About Animals Cuvier assumed a relatively short time span for Earth but was impressed by the vast changes that undoubtedly had occurred in its geologic past. His work gave new prestige to the old concept of catastrophism according to which a series of “revolutions,” or catastrophes—sudden land upheavals and floods—had destroyed entire species of organisms and carved out the present features of Earth.

He believed that the area laid waste by those spectacular paroxysms , of which Noah’s Flood was the most recent and dramatic, was sometimes repopulated by migration of animals from an area that had been spared. Catastrophism remained a major geologic doctrine until it was shown that slow changes over long periods of time could explain the features of Earth . Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Just before Napoleon abdicated , in 1814, Cuvier was elected to the Council of State, and in 1817 he became a vice president of the Ministry of the Interior. In 1817 he also published Le Règne animal distribué d’après son organisation (“ The Animal Kingdom, Distributed According to Its Organization”), which, with its many subsequent editions, was a significant advance over the systems of classification established by Linnaeus. Cuvier showed that animals possess so many diverse anatomical traits that they could not be arranged in a single linear system. Instead, he arranged animals into four large groups—vertebrates, mollusks, articulates , and radiates—each of which had a special type of anatomical organization.

All animals within the same group were classified together, as he believed they were all modifications of one particular anatomical type. Although his classification is no longer used, Cuvier broke away from the 18th-century idea that all living things were arranged in a continuous series from the simplest up to man. The increasing theoretical differences between Geoffroy and Cuvier culminated in 1830 in a public debate in the Academy of Sciences over the degree to which the animal kingdom shared a uniform type of anatomical organization—in particular, whether vertebrates and mollusks belonged to the same type. Geoffroy thought that they did and that all animals, in fact, were representatives of only one type, whereas Cuvier insisted that his four types were completely distinct. At issue in their controversy was how to explain similarity and diversity in animals. Darwin’s doctrine of evolution eventually clarified this question by showing that similar animals were descended from common ancestors and that diversity meant that hereditary changes had occurred. Cuvier’s lifework may be considered as marking a transition between the 18th-century view of nature and the view that emerged in the last half of the 19th century as a result of the doctrine of evolution.

By rejecting the 18th-century method of arranging animals in a continuous series in favour of classifying them in four separate groups, he raised the key question of why animals are anatomically different. Although Cuvier’s doctrine of catastrophism did not last, he did set the science of paleontology on a firm empirical foundation. He did this by introducing fossils into zoological classification, showing the progressive relation between rock strata and their fossil remains, and by demonstrating, in his comparative anatomy and his reconstructions of fossil skeletons, the importance of functional and anatomical relationships. More about Georges Cuvier Georges Cuvier | Discovering Lewis & Clark ® (1769-1832) Oil painting by Mathieu-Ignace van Brée (1773-1839), 1798 "Cuvier" is one of those names often repeated without a given name, so great was his fame and influence in several fields of science. He almost single-handedly developed the modern study of comparative anatomy in biology, which he applied most masterfully in vertebrate paleontology, a field that he, again nearly single-handedly, crafted into a rigorous scientific discipline.

But perhaps his greatest contribution was his demonstration of the extinction of species, which suggested the existence of numerous distinctly different biological epochs during the history of the Earth. After a traditional, but privileged education in the Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart, Cuvier first worked as a private family tutor in Normandy and avoided the worst events of the French Revolution. He emerged thereafter in an appointment to the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, newly formulated from earlier royalist collections, where he was first an assistant, and then professor of zoological anatomy. Although he always maintained important governmental appointments of one kind or another, under Napoleon and three Kings of France, he was foremost and ever-increasingly the world's master naturalist by the sheer volume and energy of his work and its wide critical acclaim. In Cuvier's time, the idea of extinction was entertained, but it was still in dispute. Evidence from the fossil record did exhibit some inexplicable variances between modern and ancient life forms. These differences, however, could be explained away as being the influence of different kinds of living environments on the organisms whose remains were observed.

While it is true that some theological doctrines precluded the outright elimination of species by natural causes, as contrary to a Divine plan of perfect world creation, the enlightened world of scholars, who often themselves were pious men and less frequently theologians, at least entertained the idea that some life forms had been wholly extirpated—and so were extinguished at times even predating the presence of humans. What was most difficult to ascertain was what extinction meant in understanding the history of the earth. Cuvier's command of comparative anatomy allowed him to move away from the traditional view that the great variety of life forms (living and fossil) were the product of environmental influences. Cuvier argued that biological function within organisms dictated the morphology of organisms, and thus morphological similarities did not necessarily indicate common ancestry. Applying these principles—with which not all contemporary scholars agreed—to the fossil record, Cuvier discerned anatomical differences between animals that seemed to be similar, among living animals and those of the fossil record alike. Probably his most eloquent studies were in elephant anatomy. Cuvier distinguished between the African and Indian living elephants of course, but he showed further that the fossil mammoths in turn differed from the elephants.

And thus, mammoths must be extinct species, including those found in Italy that had been said to be the remains of Hannibal's elephants used during the invasion of Rome in 211 B.C.E.! Cuvier made similar comparisons between elk and between sloths, the latter of which included Thomas Jefferson's American Megalonyx, and eventually he separately classified the mammoths and their relations, mastodons. —Earle E. Spamer and Richard M. McCourt, 08/06 Georges cuvier | Define Georges cuvier at Dictionary.com (ky 'vē-ā') French anatomist who is considered the founder of comparative anatomy. He originated a system of zoological classification that grouped animals according to the structures of their skeletons and organs. Cuvier extended his system to fossils; his reconstructions of the way extinct animals looked, based on their skeletal remains, greatly advanced the science of paleontology. The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.

Georges Cuvier - Biography Biography Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) French naturalist Georges Cuvier, founder of the fields of vertebrate paleontology and comparative anatomy , was born at Montbéliard (département du Doubs) on August 23, 1769 (the same year as Alexander von Humboldt and William Smith ). Montbéliard is now in France near the Swiss border, but then lay in the Duchy of Württemberg. He was the son of Jean-Georges Cuvier (1715-1795) and Clémentine Chatel (1736-1792). Though he was eventually (1829) made a baron in honor of his contributions to science, he was not born a member of the hereditary nobility. His father was a low-ranking military officer, and Georges was to reach the highest levels of academic achievement solely through hard work, study, and a tenacious memory. It was his mother who started him on the path of scholarship.

Lee (Memoires of Baron Cuvier, 1833) says she “taught him to read fluently at the age of four years, took him every morning to an elementary school, and, although herself ignorant of Latin, so scrupulously made him repeat his lessons to her, that he was always better prepared with his tasks than any other boy at the school. She made him draw under her own inspection; and, by constantly furnishing him with the best works on history and general literature, nurtured that passion for reading, that ardent desire for knowledge, which became the principal spring of his intellectual existence. Throughout his school years he stood at the head of his class in every subject. By the age of twelve, he had largely committed the contents of Buffon's immense, 36-volume Natural History to memory, which made him already at that age as knowledgeable a naturalist as almost any adult (he also at an early age made a special study of Gesner 's Historiae animalium).

Another example of his extraordinary mental powers is the fact that he managed to win first place for competence in German at his German-speaking college in Stuttgart, the Herzogliche Karls-Universität, even though he had understood scarcely a word of that language when he arrived there only nine months before. He was also artistically talented, and during his career drew innumerable expert illustrations for his articles and books. Ernst Mayr (The Growth of Biological Thought, 1982, p. 109) comments that Cuvier's “contributions to science are almost too extensive to be listed." As noted on the website of the University of California Museum of Paleontology, “Without a doubt, Georges Cuvier possessed one of the finest minds in history. Almost single-handedly, he founded vertebrate paleontology as a scientific discipline and created the comparative method of organismal biology, an incredibly powerful tool. It was Cuvier who firmly established the fact of the extinction of past lifeforms. He contributed an immense amount of research in vertebrate and invertebrate zoology and paleontology, and also wrote and lectured on the history of science.

He began his working life near Caen, in Normandy in 1788, where he became the tutor of the son of Count d'Héricy, a Protestant noble. In that relatively secluded locale, he managed to avoid the worst of the violence and atrocities of the French Revolution. While there, he studied the marine life of the coast, and completed his Memoires des Mollusques, a publication that brought him to the attention of important naturalists. He also studied the geology of the region and, among other observations, noted that the same geological strata occurred in the same sequence both on the faces of cliffs on the Normandy coast and in the shaft of an inland mine. As a result, in letters to friends in Germany, he communicated his belief that the same strata occur at different geographic locales (Rudwick 1997), a fact not then generally recognized, which he was to demonstrate formally in years to come.

Saint-Hilaire Cuvier began a correspondence with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Lacepede, and other Parisian savants, on subjects of natural history, and in the spring of 1795, he accepted their invitation to come to Paris, where he soon obtained a position at the Jardin de Plantes and a professorship at the Central School of the Pantheon. That same year, a chair of comparative anatomy was created at the Jardin de Plantes and, though it was filled by an inactive octogenarian by the name of Mertaud, Cuvier as Monsieur Mertaud's assistant performed all of the actual work and began what would eventually become his voluminous analysis of the collection of specimens there. Cuvier's comparison of the lower jaw of a mammoth (top) with that of an Indian Elephant (bottom) Almost at once, he set about revolutionizing biological thought. At the time, it was still generally believed that no animal had ever gone extinct. By showing that the fossil remains of huge animals such as woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths were distinct from those of any living animal, he convinced his colleagues for the first time of extinction as a fact.

Such creatures, he pointed out, would be far too large to overlook if they still existed. His first presentation of these assertions appeared in January, 1796 when he was just 26 years old (Mem. Inst. Nat., Math, et Phys., tome II, pp. 20-21), a landmark in the history of paleontology. Although he never tried to explain how new fossil types might come into being, no other researcher in the pre-Darwinian period produced more evidence showing that evolution actually does occur. His Récherches sur les Ossemens fossiles des Quadrupèdes (1812) provided irrefutable proof of the occurrence of evolution. His demonstration was clear: The lower the stratum, the more distinct its fauna from that of the present (viz., the lower the percentage of modern forms and the higher that of extinct ones). Cuvier documented the fact of evolution that theorists would later try to explain. He popularized the idea that fossils tell the story of past life on earth. Thus, in his Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1827, p.

3), he writes, “We admire the power by which the human mind has measured the motions of the celestial bodies, which nature seemed to have concealed forever from our view. Genius and science have burst the limits of space; and observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by means of observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the succession of events that preceded the birth of the human race? His study of the geology of the Paris basin (Description géologique des environs de Paris, 1811), which he carried out with the assistance of French chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1747), clearly demonstrated that particular fossils were characteristic of certain strata and that the same strata occurred in the same order, one above the other, in different geographic locations. He concluded that they must have been laid down over a very long period of time and that there had clearly been a faunal succession with the passage of the ages. He also provided conclusive proof that the basin had been periodically submerged beneath the sea.

His work, together with that of England's William Smith , established the science of stratigraphy, a major step in the progress of paleontology, geology, and evolutionary thought. His Le Règne Animal (1817) was the earliest taxonomic classification to include descriptions of fossil forms (many of which he himself had discovered) alongside those of living organisms. In addition, he held many high government offices during his lifetime. In particular, he played an important role in reorganizing the French educational system and in establishing schools and colleges throughout the country. Contemporaries: Mary Anning >> Beyond his academic achievements, Cuvier was also popular with the public, often entertaining crowds with his prodigious knowledge of comparative anatomy. For example, he would examine the exterior of a fossil-bearing rock, and then say what animal was hidden inside. His audience would linger in suspense as workmen slowly chipped away the stone and then applaud when, hours later, his prediction proved correct. And yet, despite all his achievements and popularity, he appears to have been a modest man. As Lee (1833), his biographer, comments, “No one ever rendered greater justice to the merit of his predecessors or contemporaries than M. Cuvier.

‘Half a century,’ he said ‘had sufficed for a complete metamorphosis in science; and it is very probable that, in a similar space of time, we also shall have become ancient to a future generation. These motives ought never to suffer us to forget the respectful gratitude we owe to those who have preceded us, or to repulse, without examination, the ideas of youth; which, if just, will prevail, whatever obstacles the present age may throw in their way. Cuvier late in life Though fortunate in his intellectual capacities and in his academic career, Cuvier was terribly unfortunate with respect to the members of his family. Three out of four of his stepchildren died at an early age, and all four of his own children died before him. The first to die was a son, soon after birth. In 1812, he lost a four-year-old daughter, and the next year, a seven-year-old son. Lee says that thereafter, “even after the lapse of years he never saw a boy of that age without considerable emotion.” The final blow came when his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Clementine, died of tuberculosis on the eve of her marriage in 1827.

Two months later, when he had returned to his duties and was sitting as chair of the Committee of the Interior, he broke down, covered his face and sobbed before apologizing to those present: “Pardon me, gentlemen,” he said, “I was a father and I have lost all” (Lee, 1833, p. 26). He himself died in Paris five years later, May 13, 1832, of cholera at the age of sixty-two. Notes: Cuvier's full name was Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier. His Protestant family came originally from a village south of Besançon in the Jura Mountains, which still bears the name of Cuvier, but moved to Montbéliard to escape persecution at the time of the Reformation. On Feb. 2 1804, he married Madame Duvaucel, née Anne Marie Sophie Loquet du Trazail (1768-1849), a widow with four children whose husband had been guillotined during the revolution. Cuvier is interred in Paris at Père-Lachaise (Section 8).

Works Cited Cuvier, G. 1827. Essay on the theory of the earth. (5th edition) London: T. Cadell. Lee R. 1833. Memoirs of Baron Cuvier. New York: J. & J. Harper. Rudwick, M. J. S. 1997. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes. New Translations & Interpretations of the Primary Texts. xvi + 301 pp. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Most shared on Macroevolution.net: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) | The Embryo Project Encyclopedia The Embryo Project Encyclopedia Recording and contextualizing the science of embryos, development, and reproduction.

User menu Keywords: teleology , classification <a href="/search?text=Georges%20Cuvier" title="" class="lexicon-term">Georges Cuvier</a> (1769-1832) Georges Cuvier , baptized Georges Jean-Léopold Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, was a professor of anatomy at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholars recognize Cuvier as a founder of modern comparative anatomy, and as an important contributor to vertebrate paleontology and geology. Cuvier studied the form and function of animal anatomy, writing four volumes on quadruped fossils and co-writing eleven volumes on the natural history of fish with Achille Valenciennes. Moreover, Cuvier constructed a system of classification based on specific and well-articulated principles to help anatomists classify animal taxa. Cuvier had public debate in 1830 with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a dispute centered on whether form or function matters most for the study of anatomy and whether the transmutation of organic forms can occur over time.

Cuvier's opinions influenced the development of biology in France, and his arguments against transmutation of types influenced the reception of Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution by natural selection among many French naturalists. Cuvier was born 23 August 1769 into a middle class family in the French-speaking community of Montébeliard, located in the Jura Mountains. At the time, Montébeliard was not yet under French jurisdiction, but it was part of the Duchy of Württemberg. Cuvier's mother, Anne Clémence Chatel, and father, Jean Georges Cuvier , a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards, were devout Lutherans. Cuvier attended the Karlsschule academy in Stuttgart, Germany, from 1784 to 1788. While at the academy Cuvier learned how to dissect animals from Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, a founder of the German school of Naturphilosophie who promoted an early version of the theory of recapitulation. The academy, founded by the Duke of Württemberg, aimed to educate future civil servants.

However, after learning German, Cuvier decided to study economics, administration, law, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and zoology, and he followed an academic path. After graduation from the Academy in 1788, Cuvier became a tutor to the noble family of the Comte d'Héricy in Normandy, France. Cuvier took shelter in Normandy during the most violent periods of the French Revolution and developed his interests in natural history . In 1795, Cuvier took a position at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, working as an assistant to the ailing Jean-Claude Mertrud, a professor of anatomy. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire extended the invitation to Cuvier after hearing of Cuiver's skill in dissecting animals. Cuvier later engaged in a public dispute with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1830. Cuvier succeeded Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton in 1799 as professor in the Collège de France. In 1802, Cuvier replaced Mertrud as chair of animal anatomy at the Paris Museum.

Cuvier spent much of his scientific career at the Paris Museum, where he produced a book on the classification of animal anatomy, Le Règne animal distribué d'après son organisation, pour servir de base à l'histoire naturelle des animaux et d'introduction à l'anatomie comparée (The Animal Kingdom Arranged after its Organization; Forming a Natural History of Animals, and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy), published in 1817. Cuvier insisted that the functional parts of animals ought to guide their classification, because animal anatomy displays functional integration—organs work together to function. To classify animals, Cuvier emphasized the principle of the subordination of characters/parts, a principle already used by botanists to classify plants. The principle prioritized those parts of an organism that researchers thought were essential for its mode of life, such as the nervous system, the circulatory system, and the respiratory system; over those parts that researchers considered subordinate, or secondary, characteristics. Cuvier prioritized function over form in taxonomy. He further advocated for his position with two principles for anatomical studies: the principle of the correlation of parts and the principle of the conditions of existence.

The correlation of parts describes the functional relationships that must exist between organs to produce a viable organism. For example, historian Peter Bowler explains that using this principle, if one were to discover the fossil remains of sharp claws, one could infer that they belonged to a carnivore, and further infer that it would have teeth with the structure necessary to seize and tear up prey. The principle of the conditions of existence reinforces functional integration between parts of animals by further requiring that these parts be in harmony with the animals' environments and their modes of life. In other words, there must be an accord between the organism, its environment and its mode of life. Cuvier described those principles in several of his works, including Leçons d'anatomie comparée (Lessons on Comparative Anatomy) published between 1800 and 1805, and Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) published in 1817. Cuvier's scientific principles reflect a teleological approach to the life sciences and natural history , influenced by Aristotle and by Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth century philosopher in Prussia.

Cuvier's principles led him to classify the animal kingdom into four main classes, or embranchements (branches), and also to deny the possibility of transmutation, what was later called evolution , between species. Before Cuvier, many naturalists and anatomists divided the animal kingdom into two main groups: the vertebrates and invertebrates. Cuvier's research and theories—especially his scientific work on molluscs, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'anatomie des mollusques (Memoires to Serve as the History and Anatomy of Molluscs) published in 1817—led him to divide the invertebrates into three additional branches: Articulata (arthropods and segmented worms ), Mollusca (which included all the bilaterally symmetrical invertebrates), and Radiata (cnidarians and echinoderms). Cuvier insisted that the four categories represented natural groups in the animal kingdom, and that individuals in one category could never transform into another category over time.

As a result, Cuvier criticized the contemporary transmutationist theories defended by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who were both contemporaries of Cuvier at the Paris Museum. Cuvier believed it was contrary to all of his principles to think that an organism could change one part of its structure over time, without any repercussions to its functionally integrated whole. Based on his principles, if an organism's structure could evolve piecemeal and slowly transform into new forms, as Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire suggested, it wouldn't survive in its environment. Cuvier also studied fossils. Near the end of the eighteenth century, scholars disputed whether fossils represented life forms that no longer existed, or whether—as the Comte de Buffon, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, believed—the fossils found in Europe and America represented animals that had migrated to the tropics. Buffon argued that God would not have let his creations go extinct.

In 1796, Cuvier presented a paper to the National Institute of Sciences and Arts in Paris, in which he compared the anatomy of living and fossil elephants, thus proving extinction to be a fact, as the fossil elephants had not been seen by recent humans . In the following years, Cuvier continued to document the extinction of animals such as the giant ground sloth, the Irish elk, and the American mastodon. Cuvier's research on extinct forms led him to investigate the causes of extinction. He proposed a catastrophist geological history of the earth. In 1825 Cuvier published his Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe (A Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe), in which he proposed that a series of catastrophic events could explain the changes in the surface of the earth and the succession of the different fauna found in the fossil record. After his death, Cuvier's theory was challenged by Charles Lyell's uniformitarian theory of earth's history.

Lyell, a geologist from Scotland who studied with Cuvier in Paris in 1823, believed, in opposition to the catastrophist theory, that gradual, uniform processes altered the surface of the earth. Lyell's theory helped persuade Charles Darwin that minute differences between organisms could suffice to produce drastic changes in form, so long as enough time had passed. In addition to his scientific work, Cuvier occupied several administrative positions in Paris, serving as the Inspector-General of the Imperial University, Vice Rector of the Faculty of Sciences, and the State Councillor. Several historians highlight Cuvier's ability to keep these influential administrative positions under the radically different French regimes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1806, Cuvier was appointed to the Royal Society of London as a foreign member. And, in 1812, he became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Cuvier was later knighted and became a Baron of France. He died on 13 May 1832. Sources Appel, Toby A. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin.

New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Bourdier, Franck. "Cuvier, Georges." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography 3: 521–8. Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea (revised edition). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Burkhardt, Richard W., Jr. "Cuvier, Georges." Europe 1789–1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire. Eds. John Merriman and Jay Winter. Vol. 2. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006: 598–9. Coleman, William. Georges Cuvier , Zoologist: A Study in the History of Evolution Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press , 1962. Cuvier, Georges. Leçons d'anatomie comparée [Lessons on Comparative Anatomy]. 5 Vols. Paris: Baudouin, 1800–1805. #page/12/mode/2up (Accessed January 2, 2013).

Cuvier, Georges. Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupeds [Researches on Quadruped Fossil Bones]. 4 Vols. Paris: Deterville, 1812. #page/10/mode/1up (Accessed January 2, 2013). Cuvier, Georges. Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et à l'anatomie des mollusques [Memoires to Serve the History and Anatomy of Molluscs]. Paris: Chez Deterville, 1817. #page/9/mode/1up (Accessed July 10, 2013). Cuvier, Georges. Le Règne Animal Distribué d'après son Organisation, pour Servir de Base à l'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux et d'Introduction à l'Anatomie Comparée [The Animal Kingdom Arranged after its Organization; Forming a Natural History of Animals, and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy]. Tome I. L'Introduction, Les Mammifères et Les Oiseaux. Paris: Deterville, 1817.

#page/12/mode/2up (Accessed January 2, 2013). Cuvier, Georges. Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe et sur les changements qu'elles ont produits dans le règne animal (1822). [A Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, and the Changes thereby Produced in the Animal Kingdom]. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1985. #page/n4/mode/2up (Accessed January 2, 2013). Grene, Marjorie. "Darwin, Cuvier and Geoffroy: Comments and Questions." History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 23 (2001): 187–211. McClellan, Chris. "The Legacy of Georges Cuvier in Auguste Comte's Natural Philosophy." Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Part A 32 (2001): 1–29. Outram, Dorinda. Georges Cuvier : Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

Rudwick, Martin J. S. Georges Cuvier , Fossil Bones, and Geographical Catastrophes: New Translations & Interpretations of the Primary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1997. Rudwick, Martin J. S. "Cuvier, Georges." New Dictionary of Scientific Biography 2: 221–7. Russell, Edward Stuart. Form and Function : A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917. #page/7/mode/1up (Accessed July 10, 2013). Taquet, Philippe. "Establishing the paradigmatic museum: Georges Cuvier 's Cabinet d'anatomie comparée in Paris." In Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, eds. Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, 3–14. New York: Routledge, 2007.

How to cite ABHSscience - Georges Cuvier Georges Cuvier Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier Georges Cuvier Georges Cuvier was born on Augest 23, 1769 and died on May 14, 1832 was well known as a naturalist and zoologist in the early 1800s (19th Century). Cuvier was a big influence in establishing anatomy and paleontology; he did this by comparing living animals and fossils. He then became known as the man who established and verified extinction as a fact. His finding of Extinction prompted the finding and theory of catastrophism. During the time of Pre- Darwin it was still believed that extinction was a myth and that no animal have become extinct before. Cuvier showed that fossil remains of larger animals such as the dinosaurs of the early years of earth, when he began to show his colleagues the facts he began to disprove that extinction was a myth and that it was a fact. He stated “Such creatures would be far too large to overlook if they still existed” (Cuvier).

He presented his findings in January 1796, known as a landmark in the history of paleontology. “Without a doubt, Georges Cuvier possessed one of the finest minds in history. Almost single-handedly, he founded vertebrate paleontology as a scientific discipline and created the comparative method of organismal biology , an incredibly powerful tool. It was Cuvier who firmly established the fact of the extinction of past lifeforms. He contributed an immense amount of research in vertebrate and invertebrate zoology and paleontology, and also wrote and lectured on the history of science” (UCMP). “Cuvier saw organisms as integrated wholes, in which each part's form and function were integrated into the entire body. No part could be modified without impairing this functional integration” (UCMP) Vocabulary Catastrophism: is the theory that small, sudden, violent, geological events took place that effected life on earth. Organismal biology: the study of the structure, function, ecology and evolution of an organism. Anatomy : is the study of an living organism (ex: humans) Extinction: is the end of life or of a group of life forms. Work Cited Georges Cuvier. (n.d.).

UCMP - University of California Museum of Paleontology. Retrieved January 14, 2013, from Georges Cuvier - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 14, 2013, from Georges Cuvier – Biography. (n.d.).Macroevolution.net. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from #.UPbU_ycR5vE Catastrophism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from Organismal Biology. (n.d.). Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from whom?. (n.d.). Anatomy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from Extinction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Retrieved January 16, 2013, from Cuvier Back Site Map Early Life Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert was born in the French speaking district of the Jura Mountains, on the Franco-Swiss border. This area was not under French rule, rather that of the Duke of Württemberg. His Father, a retired officer in the Swiss regiment brought him up in a strict Lutheran manner, in which he noticeably absorbed the works of Linnaeus, which is most likely where he attained his desire to study the natural world from. In 1784 he enrolled at the Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart, where for four years he studied economic science, natural history, and comparative anatomy. When he finally left in 1784, he was given the position of tutor to a noble family in Normandy, and it was here that he sat out the French revolution.

At the end of the war in 1795, through the contacts he had made through the family, Georges was invited to work for the Musée National d'Histoire Nataurelle, and it was here, that he was able to conduct his geological investigations, that would lead him to become of the worlds most influential figures in geology. He was soon made a professor here, and continued to teach up until he died in Paris in 1832. Fossil discoveries Ever since fossils had first been discovered, scientist had assumed that these were of extant species, going as far as too say that no species had ever gone extinct, seeing as God had designed them, it speared foolish to assume that anything he created would not have been perfect enough to survive. This ideology however, began to come under some scrutiny, especially with the work carried out by Curvier. In 1796 Curvier wrote and subsequently lectured on two papers about the possibility of extinct fauna. In his first paper he discussed the likelihood that there were two separate species of elephant alive today, the African and Indian.

The probability of there being an extinct form arose as well, in the form of the ‘Ohio animal’, which he would later describe as the Mastodon. In his paper he compared the morphological difference of the Indian elephant’s and the Mastodon’s jaw, the sketch made in his paper can be seen in figure 1. In his second paper Curvier described the Megatherium as a new species, by comparing it to modern sloth’s, again detailing the fact that this species was in fact extinct. Curvier was now firmly a non-believer in the old scientific approach that there were no extinct animals, and in his 1796 paper on elephant he wrote, ‘All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.’ This statement was the first in his active role as proponent of the theory of catastrophism, suggesting that all geological aspects and the extinction of many animals were the cause of certain and numerous catastrophic events, Curvier shied away from using the term catastrophe due to its supernatural connotations, using the phrase ‘revolutions’ instead.

This theory lost a lot of support after his death, but was nonetheless a key component in getting others to question the cause of such geological phases that had been described, and not to merely accept the old religious view of the world as fact, but to adopt the new idea of extinctions. Even though he went against the old Christian view of the evolution of life, he still believed that God had created the flora and fauna, and after each catastrophic event, new species were created. He was a stern oppose of the theory that animals could evolve in a way described as organically (proposed by Lamarck), where organisms changed morphologically over subsequent generations. During his time Curvier had many important followers of his theory, including Richard Owen. In 1808 Curvier was to be instrument in the description of the importance of reptiles in the history of the earth. It was then that he described what appeared to be a large reptilian sea creature, that he named Mososaur, the year after he was presented with a flying species, that he named Pterodactyl. It was these important finds that lead Curvier to imply that mammals had not always been the dominant force on the planet, rather the reptiles had had a time of dominance.

More and more evidence arose over the next few years to help sustain his theory, especially with important finds such as Mary Annings’ first complete Icthyosaur, and with further terrestrial finds, such as Gideon Matells’ Iguanodon. Curviers’ studies of fossil mammals instated him as a leader, and probable founder to the modern science of vertebrate palaeontology. Curvier did not just specialise in one field of study, preferring to writing papers on many different species, including the terrestrial extinct species of rhinoceros, and elephant (as mentioned previously), as well as many marine and avian species, including the fossil species of manatee and seals. References and Further Reading By Georges Curvier: Cuvier, & Pierre A. Latreille. Le Règne Animal Distribué d'après son Organisation, pour Servir de Base à l'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux et d'Introduction à l'Anatomie Comparée. Tome I. L'Introduction, Les Mammifères et Les Oiseaux. Paris, 1817. Cuvier.

Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe, et sur les changemens qu'elles ont produits dans le règne animal 3rd French edn 1825. Cuvier. Discourse on the revolutionary upheavals on the surface of the globe and on the changes which they have produced in the animal kingdom. 1825. (All these texts are available online) By Others: Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984) Larson, Edward J., Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory. The Modern Library: New York, 2004 Appel, Toby. The Cuvier-Geofroy debate: French biology in the decades before Darwin, New York & Oxford 1987. Rudwick, Martin J. S. Georges Cuvier, fossil bones, and geological catastrophes: new translations & interpretations of the primary texts, Chicago & London 1997. Sarah Lee, Memoirs of Cuvier, translated into French by T Lacordaire (1833) URLs:

Question: Georges Leopold Cuvier is associated with which science?
Answer: Paleontology