In 1769, when Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier, Baron de Cuvier, was born, the enormous disorder that had reigned over the knowledge of living species was beginning to become clear. Carlos Linnaeus, founder of modern taxonomy, had endowed most of the known creatures with “first and last names” and had grouped them into genera, genera into families, families into classes, and classes into kingdoms. However, there was a huge amount of work to be done, especially since fossil remains of creatures that no one had ever seen alive and whose meager remains barely gave an idea of their anatomy were beginning to emerge everywhere. Linnaeus believed that the species had been created as such and had not undergone changes since their creation, and Cuvier grew up nursing the same ideas of immobility of the species.
comparative anatomy
Starting from that unique creative conception, Cuvier developed a revolutionary method, comparative anatomy, to identify creatures of which only a few fossil remains remained. The fundamental principle of his method is based on the correlation that exists in the forms of living beings.
In his work “Discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe”published in 1812, Cuvier said: “Every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system whose parts fit together to perform the same action. None of the parts can be modified without the others also changing and, consequently, each part by itself indicates the form of the others..
Cuvier supports his ideas with concrete examples. If an animal’s digestive system is designed to digest meat, that may not be the creature’s only carnivorous trait. The entire anatomy of the animal will have been designed for this task: it will need powerful jaws with pointed teeth to tear the flesh of the prey, claws to capture and kill it, a muscular and bony anatomy capable of chasing and hunting it, and even the instinct of its own. a hunter.
With this novel vision, Cuvier was able to reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone. “The shape of a tooth implies the shape of the hole in which it is inserted, that of the shoulder blade, that of the nails, just as the equation of the curve contains all its properties. The same as when taking each property separately, based on a particular equation, we are able to reconstruct the complete equation; Likewise, the nail, the shoulder blade, the femur and the other bones, each one separately, allow us to know the shape of the tooth and vice versa. Beginning with each one of them, whoever rationally possesses the laws of organic economy will be able to reconstruct the complete animal.
Cuvier carried out multiple experiments on the reconstruction of modern animals from isolated bones or bone fragments using his method. The knowledge gained allowed him to go one step further and reconstruct the anatomy of extinct creatures from a few fragmentary fossil bones.
“It was necessary for each bone to rediscover the one to which it had to be set; It was almost like a small resurrection and I did not have the almighty heavenly trumpet at my disposal; but the immutable laws prescribed to living beings supplied it and, at the voice of comparative anatomy, each bone and each fragment found its place again.
Armed with his method, Cuvier revealed to his contemporaries a whole world of disappeared animals and allowed him to solve ancient paleontological enigmas such as “Homo diluvii testis”.
Man is a witness of the flood
In 1726, the Swiss physician and naturalist Johann Scheuchzer described a fossil specimen that caused an enormous stir among his contemporaries. Scheuchzer was a believer convinced of the veracity of the Biblical stories and dedicated his life to search in nature for the traces of the events described in the Holy Book. One of the most relevant catastrophic phenomena described in the Bible is the Universal Flood and Scheuchzer dedicated enormous efforts to the search for a human skeleton buried during the hecatomb. Convinced that remains of the catastrophe would be found somewhere on the globe, he undertook numerous expeditions until, finally, near Lake Constance, he discovered fossil remains enclosed between layers of slate. The fossil showed two huge eye sockets and a backbone that, to Scheuchzer’s eyes, were unmistakably human. He identified the fossil with the name “Homo diluvii testis” (the man witnessing the flood).
In 1811, Cuvier studied the remains and disproved the claims of Scheuchzer and his many followers. The bones of the so-called “Homo diluvii testis” did not belong to any human being struck down by divine wrath, they were from a giant salamander.