Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier was born in 1769 and became the architect of vertebrate paleontology, grouping classes into phyla and weaving fossils into biological classification. His comparative anatomy work identified the mastodon from North American bones and named the Megatherium from a giant sloth skeleton in Argentina; he reconstructed Palaeotherium and Anoplotherium from fragments and described the Mosasaurus. In his 1813 Essay on the Theory of the Earth, he argued that catastrophic floods had wiped out ancient life in cycles - catastrophism, not gradual change. He famously debated Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1830, rejecting Lamarck's evolutionary ideas in favor of function over morphology. Cuvier also conducted racial studies that fed scientific racism, examining Sarah Baartman in captivity and dissecting her body after death in work that compared her to monkeys. He was made Baron Cuvier in 1819 for his science, published the widely-read Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du Globe, and died of cholera in Paris in 1832. His name is on the Eiffel Tower.