Page 17 - The Restless Earth Fossils

16 Fossils

The Ichthyosaurus lived through two great extinctions but
disappeared before the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. These
shale fossils show an Ichthyosaurus mother with an infant and five
unborn babies.

enthusiasts, more widely known. The man to impress in those
days—Georges Cuvier (1769–1832)—was an ambitious French
anatomist who lived in Paris and had a rich collection of fossils
at his disposal in the Museum of Natural History there. He would
later be called the father of modern paleontology.
After dissecting many animals in the course of his anatomi-
cal studies, Cuvier was convinced that fundamental laws govern
the construction of animal anatomy just as the laws of force
and motion discovered by Isaac Newton determine the motions
of stars and planets. In other words, predators will always have
teeth and claws designed for grappling with prey and strong, agile
bodies to pursue them. Swimming animals will possess fins and
streamlined bodies, even those creatures that look nothing like
those living today—such as Mary Anning’s bizarre fish lizard.
Cuvier and other fossil hunters of the time were aware of
something else: Fossils did not appear randomly among the
rocks. Older rocks contained a different collection of fossils than
younger rocks and fossil creatures became progressively different
in deeper (and thus older) layers of rock. Many of the fossils
Cuvier found in what were called Tertiary rocks near Paris, for
example, consisted of large mammals that often resembled liv-
ing forms—much like the bones familiar to the ancient Greeks.

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