Online Galleries
From Histories of Life: Searching for Order
_-_CQ_thumb.jpg){kind=small}
Cuvier, Ossemens fossiles
Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles.... Vol. 4. Paris: Deterville, 1812.
Early in the 19th century, French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier was renowned for his reconstructions of whole skeletons based on a single bone, like the jaw bone shown here. Using the fossil record, Cuvier found nature’s order within the animal body. He believed that species were fixed, with each creature so perfectly formed that if it were to change, it would not survive. He firmly rejected the pre-Darwinian notions of evolution (“transformism”) and argued that the history of life was a succession of creations and extinctions.
