Wikijunior:Life/Yesterday/Cuvier

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Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier was born in 1769.

He worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The museum had made a big collection of fossils

from many different parts of the world.

At the time, people were not sure about fossils.

Were they species of animals that were no longer living?

Cuvier showed that they were.

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Cuvier found that mammoths were not like modern elephants. He decided they were extinct.

Cuvier carefully studied elephants from Africa and India. He found that they were so different, that they are really two different species. He studied the remains of mammoths too. Mammoths are different to African elephants and Indian Elephants, so they were a different species as well. Cuvier compared a lot more living creatures with fossil ones. He decided that fossils were different species that had become extinct.