Georges Cuvier

About this figure

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French naturalist often credited with founding the sciences of comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology. Born in Montbeliard, then outside France, he was educated in Stuttgart before moving to Paris, where he became a professor at the Musee national d'Histoire naturelle. Working from fossil bones of mammoths, mastodons, and other extinct creatures, Cuvier argued forcefully that species could and did go extinct, a claim that ran against the prevailing assumption of a fixed, unchanging natural order.

He developed the principle of the correlation of parts, holding that an animal's anatomy formed an integrated functional system, so that a skilled anatomist could infer the structure of an entire skeleton from a single characteristic bone. His 1812 Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe, later translated into English as the Essay on the Theory of the Earth, laid out his view that the geological and fossil record showed a series of sudden upheavals rather than slow, continuous change, a position that put him at odds with the more gradualist and transformist ideas advanced by contemporaries such as Lamarck, whose theory of the transmutation of species Cuvier rejected.

Beyond the laboratory, Cuvier held significant public office across a succession of French governments, serving on the Council of State and overseeing aspects of French education under Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Monarchy. He was made a baron in 1819 and a peer of France shortly before his death. He died in Paris in 1832, reportedly during a cholera epidemic. Cuvier's insistence on evidence drawn from careful comparative dissection, joined to his willingness to draw sweeping conclusions about the history of the earth from that evidence, made him one of the most influential and most disputed naturalists of his age.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.