Baron Georges Cuvier

A self-made scholar of humble origins -- his father was a low-ranking retired military officer -- Cuvier reached the highest levels of academic achievement through hard work, study, and a tenacious memory (he only became "Baron" when he was made a peer for life in 1819 in honor of his contributions to science). Throughout his school years he consistently 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 Natural History to memory, which made him already at that age as knowledgeable a naturalist as almost any adult. 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, even though he had understood scarcely a word of that language when he had arrived there only nine months before.

Ernst Mayr (The Growth of Biological Thought, 1982, p. 109) comments that Cuvier's "contributions to science are almost too extensive to be listed." By showing that the remains of huge animals such as woolly mammoths and giant ground sloths were distinct from those of any living animal, Cuvier established extinction as a fact. Such creatures, he pointed out, would be far too large to overlook if they still existed. His two papers on these animals, landmarks in the history of paleontology, both appeared in 1796 when he was just 27 years old. At the time, it was still generally believed that no animal had ever gone extinct.

He often entertained crowds with his prodigious knowledge of comparative anatomy. For example, he would examine the exterior of a fossil-bearing rock, and then state the identity of the animal hidden inside. His audience would linger in suspense as workmen slowly chipped away the stone and then applaud when, hours later, his prediction turned out correct. His Le Règne Animal was the earliest taxonomic classification to include descriptions of fossil forms, many of which he himself had discovered, alongside those of living organisms.

Although he never tried to explain how new fossil types might come into being, no other researcher in the pre-Darwinian period produced more new evidence demonstrating 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 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 minerologist Alexandre Brongniart, showed 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 both paleontology and geology.