Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

Cuvier was born on August 23, 1769, at Montbéliard, France.

In 1795, he went to Paris where he was appointed an assistant, and shortly thereafter a professor of animal anatomy, at the newly reformed National Museum of Natural History.  Cuvier stayed at his post when Napoleon came to power, and was appointed to several government positions, including Inspector-General of public education and State Councillor, by Napoleon. Cuvier served under three successive Kings of France; so serving under three different, opposing French governments - Revolution, Napoleonic, and monarchy.  By the time of his death in 1832 he had been knighted and made a Baron and a Peer of France.

Almost single-handedly, Cuvier firmly established the fact of the extinction of past lifeforms founding vertebrate palaeontology.

Other scientists of the time could not believe that God, having created all things and pronounced them good, would allow any of them to be wiped out.  Some scientists interpreted fossils as remains of living species and others thought that the unusual organisms then known only as fossils still survived in unexplored parts of the world.

Cuvier believed that the Earth was immensely old, and that for most of its history conditions had been more or less like those of the present.  However, periodic catastrophes had befallen the Earth and each one wiped out a number of species. Cuvier regarded these events as events with natural causes, and considered their causes and natures to be an important geological problem.

Cuvier created the comparative method of organismal biology and saw organisms as integrated wholes, in which each part's form and function were integrated into the entire body.  No part could be modified without impairing this functional integration.  Cuvier's beliefs led him to classify animals into four "branches,": Vertebrata, Articulata Mollusca (which at the time meant all other soft, bilaterally symmetrical invertebrates), and Radiata.

Cuvier's realisation that extinction is real was a great advance for science. Furthermore, Cuvier's integration of organismal function into the study of form proved to be a powerful tool for biologists.

http://science.wolfram.com/biography/Cuvier.html

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/cuvier.html