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LAMARCK THE FOUNDER OF INVERTEBRATE PALA- 
ONTOLOGY 
Ir was fortunate for paleontology that the two 
createst zodlogists of the end of the eighteenth and 
the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Lamarck 
and Cuvier, lived in the Paris basin, a vast cemetery 
of corals, shells, and mammals; and not far from 
extensive deposits of cretaceous rocks packed with 
fossil invertebrates. With their then unrivalled 
knowledge of recent or existing forms, they could 
restore the assemblages of extinct animals which 
peopled the cretaceous ocean, and more especially the 
tertiary seas and lakes. 
Lamarck drew his supplies of tertiary shells from 
the tertiary beds situated within a radius of from 
twenty-five to thirty miles from the centre of Paris, 
and chiefly from the village of Grignon, about ten 
miles west of Paris, beyond Versailles, and still a rich 
collecting ground for the students of the Museum 
and Sorbonne. He acknowledges the aid received 
from Defrance,* who had already collected at Grignon 
five hundred species of fossil shells, three-fourths of 
which, he says, had not then been described. 
Lamarck’s first essay (‘‘ Sur les fossiles’’) on fossils 
* Although Defrance (born 1759, died in 1850) aided Lamarck in 
collecting tertiary shells, his earliest paleontological paper (on Hip- 
ponyx) did not appear until the year 1819. 
