Georges Cuvier 1769-1832

In France, a young paleontologist named Georges Cuvier compared the skulls of living elephants to the fossils of elephants that had been unearthed in Siberia, Europe, and North America -- and places were no elephants are found today. Cuvier sketched out their massive jaws, their teeth fused togethr into corrugated slabs. He demonstrated that the fossil elephants (called mammoths) were fundamentally different from those alive today -- “as much as, or more than, the dog differs fro mthe jackal and the hyena.” He wrote. It would be hard to claim that such a distinctive giant was wandering around without anyone noticing. For the first time, a naturalist had shown that species had become extinct in the past.

Cuvier went on to demonstrate that many other mammals had gone extinct as well. His discoveries, he wrote, “seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe. But what was this primitive earth? . . . . Page 10