Introduction

Georges (Baron) Cuvier (1769–1832), who worked in the late eighteenth century, is often identified as the Father of Vertebrate Paleontology. He achieved this eminence by virtue of two things. First, he recognized that some organisms had become extinct. The idea that species were not immortal was a revolutionary one. Species were traditionally held to have remained unchanged and immutable since the point of Creation. Cuvier believed that episodic global catastrophes accounted for these extinctions. A new creation would account for subsequent species. The history of life on earth thus became a series of revolutionary extinctions and creations.

Second, Cuvier recognized that fossil bones and teeth resembled those of living animals, and that these bones and teeth could be used to reconstruct the lifeways of extinct creatures. In fact, it was the fond expectation of Baron Cuvier that future anatomists would discover morphological rules or relationships that would allow an absolute knowledge of the lifeways of an extinct species from even a single bone or tooth. Animals were machines whose bodies worked through mechanical principles. It was the duty of functional morphologists to discover these principles. Cuvier seems to have expected that there would be an inevitable relationship between an animal’s niche and its anatomy. In the same way that mathematicians have discovered the equations for an ellipse or a circle, Cuvier believed that future anatomists would discover the absolute relationships, as rigorous as equations, between form and function. To this end, Cuvier articulated a “law” of correlation of parts.