Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist born 7 September 1707. He served as intendant at the Jardin du Roi - the King's Garden, now the Jardin des Plantes - and from that post published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with more appearing in the two decades after his death on 16 April 1788. He was among the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, and his theories on geological history and animal evolution pressed against the biblical creation story hard enough that the University of Paris theology committee forced him to recant. Ernst Mayr later called him "the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century," and his work shaped the next two generations, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier.