Cuvier was born August 23, 1769, at Montbéliard, a French-speaking community in the Jura Mountains in western Germany. He attended Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart, and after working as a tutor in Normandy, he was named Professor of Anatomy at the Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1795. In 1800 he became Professor of Natural History at the College of France, and in 1802 he became Professor of Anatomy at the Botanic Garden.
Cuvier was known for his talent for assimilating and analysing facts, but was not considered to be an outstanding original theorist. As a skilled comparative anatomist, Cuvier was able to untangle some of the problems in studying vertebrate fossils. He became famous for reconstructing fossil animals from only fragmentary fossil remains. Cuvier was also ahead of his time in that he was one of the first paleontologists to use the muscle scars on fossilized bones to reconstruct the musculature of the animal.
Cuvier named many taxonomic groups of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, including the phylum Mollusca (the mollusks) (1798), class Cephalopoda (the squids and octopi) (1797), class Gastropoda (the snails) (1797), and the genera: Pterodactylus (pterosaurs) (1809), as well as Ziphius cavirostris (Cuvier's Beaked Whale) (1823), Stenella frontalis (Atlantic Spotted Dolphin) (1838), Grampus griseus (Risso's Dolphin) (1828), Paleosuchus palpebrosus (Cuvier's dwarf caiman) (1807), and many other species of vertebrates and invertebrates.
In 1818 Cuvier saw some bones that the Reverend William Buckland at the University of Oxford had collected. He became very interested in them, and hoped to describe the species himself, but Buckland chose to study the specimen and publish the description. Megalosaurus, described by Buckland in 1824, became the first species of dinosaur to be named and described, although Sir Richard Owen did not name the Dinosauria until 1842. (Be sure to read my article "Brontosaurus versus Aparosaurus" for more information on the scientific naming of species.)
In 1828, Mary Anning discovered the remains of a plesiosaur in England. Cuvier doubted the validity of her specimen, and originally denounced her find. When he saw the bones, however, he became convinced that the specimen was real, and a new species. Cuvier became a big supporter of Miss Anning, and he sold many of the fossils from his own collection in order to help her and her family financially.
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