Among his other accomplishments, Cuvier established that elephant-like bones found in North America belonged to an extinct animal he later would name as a "mastodon", and that a large skeleton dug up in present-day Argentina was of a giant, prehistoric ground sloth, which he named Megatherium. [6]

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the father of modern paleontology, was the first European naturalist to articulate a scientific theory of extinction, based on his studies proving that mastodons and mammoths were the prehistoric ancestors of living elephants.

2023年1月5日 · Georges Cuvier studied fossilized bones from Big Bone Lick and other parts of the world, using the bones to define and interpret mastodons as a type of extinct elephant. Georges Cuvier by James Thompson, c. 1800 engraving, Smithsonian libraries image.

A mastodon (mastós 'breast' + odoús 'tooth') is a member of the genus Mammut (German for 'mammoth'), which was endemic to North America and lived from the late Miocene to the early Holocene. Mastodons belong to the order Proboscidea, the same order as elephants and mammoths (which belong to the family Elephantidae).

Cuvier went on to publish the results of study after study documenting the past existence of large mammals that resembled no living species: the giant ground sloth, the Irish elk, the American mastodon, and many others. With these studies, Cuvier …

2013年12月8日 · Cuvier referred to the first lost species as a mammoth, and the second as an “Ohio animal.” A decade later, he would invent a new name for the beast from Ohio; he would call it a mastodon....

2014年12月22日 · Sketch of American mastodon (Top) and mammoth (Bottom) molars by Cuvier. Mastodon molars show a browser morphology specialized for crushing branches and leaves of trees and shrubs, whereas mammoth molars have the morphology of …

2014年12月12日 · Mastodons were smaller than mammoths, bearing a sloped forehead, straighter and shorter tusks, and they are, as Cuvier (1) noted, easily distinguished from mammoths by their teeth. Mastodon molars have two rows of raised and rounded cusps that were effective at crushing branches and leaves (Fig. 1).

1998年4月2日 · Fossil bones revisited: Cuvier's reconstruction of a “mastodon”, previously known as the “Ohio animal”. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was one of the outstanding figures in science during the...

2015年10月13日 · The paper presents Cuvier’s findings from his analysis of Indian and African elephant skeletons as well as mammoth fossils and a fossil skeleton known as the “Ohio animal,” which would later be named “mastodon” by Cuvier.