Baron George Cuvier (1769-1832)

French anatomist, worked on animal classification and founder of comparative anatomy. He excelled in the fields of anatomy, paleontology and natural history.

Known as Georges Cuvier, Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier (August 23, 1769 – May 13, 1832), was born in Montbéliard, France, where his Protestant ancestors lived since the time of the Reformation by Martin Luther.  He was a French naturalist and zoologist.

His father, Jean George Cuvier, a bourgeois of his hometown, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards. His mother was Anne Clémence Chatel.  At the time the town which was annexed to France on 10 October 1793 belonged to the Duchy of Wuerttemberg. She was much younger than his father, tutored him diligently throughout his early years so that he easily surpassed the other children at school.During his years at the gymnasium, he breezed through in acquiring his Latin and Greek, and was always at the head of his class in geography, mathematics, and history.

A major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century, Baron Georges Cuvier is best noted for establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and stratigraphy, the first thorough, published written document of faunal succession in the fossil record; and opposition to gradualistic theories of evolution of Lamarck and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, and making extinction as an accepted scientific phenomenon.His most famous work is the Le Règne Animal (1817; English: The Animal Kingdom). In 1819, he was created a peer for life in honor of his scientific contributions, becoming Baron Georges Cuvier.

George Cuvier, Baron, died of cholera in Paris, in 1832.

Sources:

• Coleman, W. (1962). Georges Cuvier, Zoologist.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press

• Lee, Mrs R. (1833). Memoirs of Baron Cuvier.  London: Longman, Reese, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman.

Image Credit:

Georges Cuvier, Wiki Commons Public Domain