Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier, known…

1796 CE

Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier, known as Georges Cuvier, was born in Montbéliard, France, where his Protestant ancestors had lived since the time of the Reformation.

His father, Jean George Cuvier, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards and a bourgeois of the town of Montbéliard; his mother was Anne Clémence Chatel.

At the time, the town, which was annexed to France on October 10, 1793, had belonged to the Duchy of Württemberg.

His mother, who was much younger than his father, had tutored him diligently throughout his early years so that he easily surpassed the other children at school.

During his gymnasium years, he had little trouble acquiring Latin and Greek, and was always at the head of his class in mathematics, history, and geography.

Soon after entering the gymnasium, at age ten, he had encountered a copy of Conrad Gesner's Historiae Animalium, the work that first sparked his interest in natural history.

He then began frequent visits to the home of a relation where he could borrow volumes of Buffon's massive Histoire Naturelle.

All of these he read and reread.

He remained at the gymnasium for four years, then spent an additional four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all of his coursework.

Although he knew no German on his arrival, after only nine months study he managed to win the school prize for that language.

Upon graduation, he had no money to await appointment to academic office, so in July 1788 he took a job at Fiquainville chateau in Normandy as tutor to the only son of the Comte d'Héricy, a Protestant noble.

It was here during the early 1790s that he began his comparisons of fossils with extant forms.

Cuvier regularly attended meetings held at the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics.

There, he became acquainted with Henri Alexandre Tessier (1741–1837), a physician and well-known agronomist who had fled the Terror in Paris and assumed a false identity.

After hearing Tessier speak on agricultural matters, Cuvier recognized him as the author of certain articles on agriculture in the Encyclopédie Méthodique and addressed him as M. Tessier.

Tessier replied in dismay, "I am known, then, and consequently lost."

— " Lost!" replied M. Cuvier; "no; you are henceforth the object of our most anxious care."

"They soon became intimate and Tessier introduced Cuvier 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 entered into correspondence with several leading naturalists of the day and was invited to Paris.

Arriving in the spring of 1795, at the age of twenty-six, he soon became the assistant of Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), who had been appointed to the newly created chair of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes.

The Institut de France was founded in the same year, and he was elected a member of its Academy of Sciences.

In 1796, he begins to lecture at the École Centrale du Pantheon, and at the opening of the National Institute in April, he reads his first paleontological paper, which will subsequently be published in 1800 under the title Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles.

In this paper, he analyzes skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants as well as mammoth fossils, and a fossil skeleton known at that time as the 'Ohio animal'.

Cuvier's analysis establishes, for the first time, the fact that African and Indian elephants are different species and that mammoths are not the same species as either African or Indian elephants and therefore must be extinct.

He further states that the 'Ohio animal' represents a distinct extinct species that is even more different from living elephants than mammoths are.

Years later, in 1806, he will return to the 'Ohio animal' in another paper and give it the name Mastodon.

In his second paper in the year 1796, he describes and analyzes a large skeleton found in Paraguay, which he names Megatherium.

He concludes that this skeleton represents yet another extinct animal and, by comparing its skull with living species of tree dwelling sloths, that it is a kind of ground dwelling giant sloth.

Together these two 1796 papers are a landmark event in the history of paleontology and in the development of comparative anatomy as well.

They also greatly enhance Cuvier's personal reputation, and they essentially end what had been a long running debate about the reality of extinction.