Cuvier Day
Coleoptera.
Cuvier loved natural history from an early age. By twelve years of age, he’d largely committed Buffon’s massive Natural History compilation to memory.
(via scientificillustration)
Source: biomedicalephemera
Cuvier Day extra plates - All illustrations from publications by Baron Georges Cuvier
Compound eyes of insects - though it was largely his younger brother who studied animal behavior and instinct, Georges Cuvier made extensive notes on the different ways that the insects he kept hunted or appeared to find food.The differences in their eyes and legs and how those appeared to influence their hunting style/food type fascinated him. Though most of his hypotheses on why or how entomological anatomical features worked were incorrect (as hypotheses are apt to be), Cuvier’s insects kept him occupied for many a happy hour at the Academy, and honed his observational skills immensely.
(via scientificillustration)
Source: biomedicalephemera
Cuvier Day
Peacock and Pheasant
Cuvier deflected suggestions that his theories of what’s known as “catastrophism” (the Earth was immensely old, all animals have existed in their current form, but, there were mass extinctions of great numbers of species at certain periods) were Biblically inspired. He developed his theories from finding massive caches of fossils of species that he could demonstrate did not currently exist in certain strata of the earth.
