Georges Cuvier proved species go extinct, yet rejected evolution entirely
In the 1790s many naturalists doubted that any species had ever vanished completely. Georges Cuvier compared fossil bones with living animals and settled the argument, naming the mastodon and the giant ground sloth Megatherium. The same man fought every early theory of evolution and preferred repeated catastrophic floods.
Cuvier was born on 23 August 1769 in Montbéliard, to a family that took its name from a Jura village; his father was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards. At ten he discovered Conrad Gessner's history of animals and began borrowing volumes of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle from a relative. He then studied four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, winning its German prize after only nine months, despite arriving with no knowledge of the language.
Short of money, he took a tutoring post in Normandy in 1788 and there began comparing fossils with living forms. The agronomist Tessier met him, wrote that he had found a pearl in a dunghill, and introduced him to Paris scientists. In 1796 Cuvier presented a paper on living and fossil elephants; with a companion paper that year, it essentially closed the long dispute over whether extinction was real, and it became a turning point for paleontology and comparative anatomy.
He extended Linnaean classification by grouping classes into larger divisions and placing fossils beside living species. He named the flying reptile Pterodactylus and described Mosasaurus. His 1813 Essay on the Theory of the Earth argued that periodic floods wiped out species, making him catastrophism's leading voice. In 1830 he publicly debated Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, defending function over morphology and rejecting Lamarck. In 1812 he also predicted that few large animals remained undiscovered. His racial studies helped lay foundations for scientific racism, and he examined Sarah Baartman while she was held captive and neglected.
Cuvier held high office under Napoleon, the restored Bourbons and Louis Philippe, including Minister of the Interior and Peer of France, while remaining a devout Lutheran. Of his four children, three died in infancy and his daughter Clémentine died at 18 in 1827, so he outlived them all. He died on 13 May 1832.
Source: Georges Cuvier
