Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Offered the chance to accompany Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, Cuvier chose to stay
close to the collection of the museum. He preferred to have specimens come to him and
issued an appeal for collectors to send fossils, drawings, or descriptions for him to assess.
In return, he offered to authoritatively identify the bones, a skill that few others in his day
possessed. Cuvier's masterful ability to relate the structure of organisms to their biological
function netted him a role as a scientific referee on issues related to vertebrate anatomy.
Today, he is known as the founder of vertebrate paleontology.
In the first public summary of his research, Cuvier treated fossils as if they were all the
same age. The bones of fossil elephants (mammoths) were evidence of a previous world
destroyed by some kind of catastrophe. Later, as he came to realize that different geologic-
al formations held distinctive fossils, he recognized that the fossils in the older beds were
progressively different from the modern fauna.
As he continued to amass specimens, Cuvier increasingly recognized patterns in the or-
ganization of life through time. Ammonites were found exclusively in the lower and there-
fore older formations, mammoths were found in the highest and most recent formations of
surficial debris. Human bones were not found as fossils. If fossils truly represented extinct
plants and animals, and not just species hiding out in the deep sea or in unexplored wil-
derness, then Earth had a distinct history in which life approached the form of the present
fauna through the turnover of species unlike any known today. Cuvier's skills, intellect, and
intuition combined to lead the way forward in piecing together earth history. His advances
rivaled those of any other scholar up until that time.
Cuvier speculated that extinctions happened during violent geological revolutions, sud-
den disasters for which he invoked the well-preserved bodies of mammoths as evidence:
“In the northern regions it has left the carcases of some large quadrupeds which the ice had
arrested, and which are preserved even to the present day with their skin, their hair, and
quite six-thousand-year-old Earth was simply inadequate to accommodate the diversity of
fossil life. Certainly, one great flood was not enough to explain earth history. “Life, there-
fore, has been often disturbed on this earth by terrible events—calamities which, at their
