Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier was a French naturalist and zoologist who founded vertebrate paleontology and comparative anatomy as rigorous sciences. Working at the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, he showed from fossil elephant remains that some species once alive had gone extinct, a claim still contested when he made it, and developed the principle of the correlation of parts, that an animal's anatomy could be reconstructed from a single bone because every part of a functioning body constrains every other. He was a fierce opponent of Lamarck's transformism, holding instead that species were fixed and that the fossil record's changes across strata reflected a series of catastrophic extinctions and repopulations rather than gradual transformation. He was made a baron in 1819 and a peer of France in 1831.