Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769-1832)

Early Life

• Born in Montbéliard, France• Father was a retired officer on half pay• Family was Lutheran• Had to emigrate from Jura Mountains to

avoid religious persecution• Early in life Cuvier was given the works

of Linnaeus and Buffon beginning his interest in natural phenomena

Political Climate in France

• Cuvier served under three different opposing French governments

– The French Revolution 1788-1799

– Napoleon 1804-1814

– The Monarchy 1815-to his death

Education and Professional Career

• Attended Karlsschule in Stuttgart, a strict military school in Germany 1784-1788

• Became tutor of a noble family Comte d'Héricy in Normandy, France

• While tutoring, he was in correspondence with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, then in 1795 at age 26, he became the assistant to the professor of comparative anatomy at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, in Paris

Professional and Academic Accomplishments

• 1795, Cuvier was an elected member of the Academy of Sciences at the Institut of France

• 1799, succeeded Daubenton as professor of natural history in the College de France

• 1802, he became titular professor at the Jardin des Plantes• 1803, he was chosen Permanent Secretary of the

Department of Physical Sciences of the Academy• 1806, he became a foreign member of the Royal Society (like

Ray)• In 1819 he was appointed president of the committee of the

interior, and retained the office until his death• In 1826 he was made grand officer of the Legion of Honor• In 1831 he was made Baron and a Peer of France

Places Where He Worked

Extinction

• Founded the idea of extinction– Presented this in a paper in

1796 on the fossils of elephants

– It was believed before that no species of animal had ever been extinct, because God’s creation had been perfect

– Pictured is an illustration of an Indian elephant jaw and a mammoth jaw, he also found the extinct remains of the giant ground sloth, the Irish elk, the American mastodon

Catastrophism

• Active in belief of Catastrophism• Believed that there had not been a single

catastrophe but several, resulting in a succession of different faunas– The Great Flood was one of them

• “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.”

• After his death, this theory lost ground to uniformitarianism, championed by Lyell

Stratigraphy and Fossils

• Helped to establish the concept Stratigraphy in the study paleontology

• First to correctly identify a fossil in Bavaria as a small flying reptile– Also recognized that there was a point

when reptiles were the dominant fauna over mammals

Principle of Correlation of Parts

• Founds Principle of Correlation of Parts• A huge idea that is central to the concepts of comparative anatomy and

paleontology• all the anatomical structure and individual organs of an animal are the

way they are and "collaborate" with each other, so as to adapt the animal to "the conditions of its existence"

• “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.”

• It was said that Cuvier could construct an entire skeleton based on a single bone

Picture of a Hippopotamus in Cuvier’s Studies

Opposition to Evolution

• Was skeptical of the ways of change that evolution supporters proposed, instead believing that all species were created at once, but that some had since suffered extinction

• This was due to his principle of correlation of parts – Made him doubt that any mechanism could ever modify

any part of an animal in isolation of other parts without killing itself

– Used 2,000 year old animals found mummified from Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt to exhibit the limited change in the animal that he saw in his present day

Cuvier’s Embranchements

• Cuvier’s insistence on functional integration led him to classify animals into four branches– Vertebrata– Articulata (arthropods and segmented worms)– Mollusca – Radiata

• 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 and Linnaeus

• Cuvier refined the taxonomic system of Linnaeus by employing the term phylum, which allows for the similarities between apparently dissimilar species.

Chief Scholarly Works

• Tableau Élémentaire de l'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux (1797)

• Leçons d'Anatomie Comparée (1800-05)• Rapport Historique sur les Progrès des Sciences

Naturelles depuis 1789, et sur Leur État Actuel (1810)• Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles de Quadrupèdes

(1812, essay)• Le Règne Animal Distribué d'Après son Organisation

(1817)• Mémoires pour l'Ervir de l'Histoire et a l'Anatomie des

Mollusques (1817)• Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe (1825)

Wrap Up

• Considered the father of comparative anatomy • Foundational worker in fossil as well as

contemporary anatomy• Founded idea of extinction• Commemorated in the naming of many animals

– Cuvier’s Beaked Whale– Cuvier’s Gazelle– Cuvier’s Toucan– Galeocerdo cuvieri (Tiger Shark)

References

• http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/cuvier.html

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier

• http://www.victorianweb.org/science/cuvier.html

• http://www.nndb.com/people/745/000091472/