Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (born in Montbéliard, August 23, 1769 - died in Paris, May 13, 1832 ) is a French naturalist and zoologist. He is the brother of Frédéric Cuvier (1773-1838) who is also a naturalist. He was a major figure in the cycle of science in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century and founded the field of comparative anatomy and paleontology by comparing living animals with fossils. He is famous for stating that extinction is a fact, became the most influential proponent of the geology at the beginning of the 19th century and early evolutionary theory against. The results of the famous animal Règne distribué d'Après son Organisation.
Cuvier was born in Montbéliard, France (in the department of Doubs), where his ancestors had lived since the Protestant Reformation. His father, Jean George Cuvier, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard and the bourgeois town of Montbéliard; mother Anne Clemence Chatel. At that time the town was annexed to France on October 10, 1793 belongs to the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother, who is much younger than his father, taught him .. diligently throughout the early years so that he easily surpassed the other kids at school. During the gymnasium, he had little trouble getting the Latin and Greek, and always at the head of the class in math, history, and geography .. According to Lee, "The history of mankind is, from his earliest days, the subject of the application of the most tireless, and a long list of rulers, princes, and the chronological facts of the driest, once set in his memory, never forgotten.
Soon after entering the gym, at the age of 10, she met a copy of the Historiae Animalium Gesner, the first job that sparked his interest in natural history. He then began a frequent visitor to the house of a relation in which he could borrow a large volume of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle. All this he read and re-read, retain so much information that at the age of twelve years "he was so familiar with quadrupeds and birds as a naturalist first rate." He remained in the gym for four years. Cuvier spent an additional four years at the Academy of Caroline in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all her courses. Although he did not know German at his arrival, after only nine months of study he won the school prize for that language.
After graduation, he had no money to wait for an appointment to the academic office. So in July, 1788 he took a job at Fiquainville chateau in Normandy as tutor to the Comte d'Héricy only son, a Protestant nobleman. This is where during the 1790s that he began his comparison of fossil with extant forms. Cuvier regularly attend meetings held in the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics. There, he became acquainted with Henri Alexandre Tessier (1741-1837), a renowned physician and agronomist who had fled the terror in Paris and took a false identity. After hearing Tessier spoke about agricultural issues, Cuvier recognized him as the author of certain articles on agriculture in Méthodique Encyclopedia and called M. Tessier. Tessier said anxiously, "I know, at the time, and consequently lost." - "Lost!" replied M. Cuvier; "no; You further object of our most anxious care." They soon became familiar and Tessier Cuvier introduced to his colleagues in Paris - "I have just found a pearl in the dunghill of Normandy", he wrote his friend Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. As a result Cuvier enter into correspondence with some of today's leading naturalists and was invited to Paris. Arriving in the spring of 1795, at age 26, he soon became assistant to Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728-1802), who has been appointed to the newly created chair of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. Institut de France was founded the same year.
In 1796 he began teaching at the École Centrale du Pantheon, and the opening of the National Institute in April, she read the first paper of paleontology, which were later published in 1800 under the title Memoires sur les elephants vivants et d'espèces fossiles. In this paper he analyzed the skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants and giant fossils and the fossil skeleton known at that time as' Ohio animal. Cuvier's analysis established, for the first time, the fact that African and Indian elephants and the mammoth different species is not the same species as either African or Indian elephants and therefore must be extinct. He further stated that the 'Ohio animal' represents a different species extinct is even more different from the life of the mammoth elephant. Years later, in 1806, he will return to the 'Ohio animal' in another paper and give it the name of Mastodon. In the second paper in 1796, he will describe and analyze the large skeleton found in Paraguay, which he would name megatherium.
He concluded that this framework represents the other extinct animals and, by comparing the skull with living species of tree dwelling sloths, that's sort of ground dwelling giant sloth. Together, the two 1796 papers is a significant event in the history of paleontology and comparative anatomy in the development as well. They also greatly enhance the personal reputation of Cuvier, and they essentially ended what has been a longstanding debate about the reality of extinction. In 1799 he succeeded Daubenton as professor of natural history at the College de France. In 1802 she became titular professor at the Jardin des Plantes, and in the same year he was appointed commissioner of the Institute to accompany the inspector general of public instruction. In the latter capacity he visited the south of France, but in the early part of 1803, he was elected Permanent Secretary of the Department of Physical Sciences of the Academy, and he consequently abandoned the previous appointment and returned to Paris.
In 1806, he became a foreign member of the Royal Society and in 1812, foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He now devoted himself more particularly to three lines of inquiry: the structure and classification of the Mollusca, comparative anatomy and systematic arrangement of the fish, fossil mammals and reptiles and, second, with the bones of the life sciences group belongs to the the same. In 1821, Cuvier made what is called "Rash Dictum": he says that it is unlikely that any large animals remain undiscovered. Many discoveries have been made since the statement of Cuvier. Cuvier was by birth, education, and beliefs of a devout Lutheran, and remained Protestant all his life all by regularly attending church services. Although he considered his personal faith to be a private matter he clearly identifies himself with the recognition of minority groups when he supervised the government's education program for Protestants and also very active in founding the Bible Society of Paris in 1818 where he later served as vice president. From 1822 until his death in 1832, Cuvier was the Grand Master of the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of France. None of us work Cuvier achieve a higher reputation from Animal Règne Le, the first edition of which appeared in four octavo volumes in 1817, and the second in five volumes in 1829-1830. In a classic work Cuvier embodied the results of all previous studies on the structure of living and fossil animals. The whole job itself, with the exception of parts of the Insecta, in which he was assisted by his friend Latreille.
Cuvier is commemorated in the naming of some animals, they include Cuvier's beaked whale (who first thought to be extinct), Cuvier's Gazelle, Cuvier's toucan, Cuvier Bichir, Galeocerdo Cuvier (tiger sharks), and Anolis cuvieri, lizards of Puerto Rico. There are also some extinct animals named after Cuvier, such as the South American giant sloth Catonyx cuvieri. Cuvier Island in New Zealand named after Cuvier by D'Urville. He eventually died in Paris because of cholera.
