To spread healthy ideas among even the lowest classes of people, to remove men from the influence of prejudice and passion, to make reason the arbite… - Georges Cuvier

About Georges Cuvier

Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (August 23, 1769 – May 13, 1832) was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils. Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification. Cuvier is also known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. In this way, Cuvier became the most influential proponent of catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century. His most famous work is the Le Règne Animal (1817; translated into English as The Animal Kingdom).

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