Baron Georges Leopold Chretien Frederic Dagobert 

 Cuvier is the acknowledged "father" of the science of 

 paleontology. He was born August 23, 1769 at Mont- 

 beliard, France, the son of religious refugees from the 

 Jura. He early showed an unusual inclination toward 

 the investigation of natural phenomena and was noted for 

 his studious habits and marvelous memory. After four 

 years at the Academy of Stuttgart, he went to Paris where 

 in 1795 he was appointed assistant professor of com- 

 parative anatomy at the Museum d'Historie Naturelle. In 

 1796 he read his first paper on a paleontological subject, 

 Memoires sur les Especes d 'Elephants Vivants et Fossiles, 

 before the National Institute. This paper was published 

 in 1800. His studies were devoted principally to the 

 mollusca, the fishes, the fossil mammals and the reptiles. 

 His voluminous publications present their systematic classi- 

 fication and relation to living forms. He died, after a short 

 illness, May 13, 1832, at Paris, the world's first great 

 paleontologist. 



Sir Richard Owen, the noted English biologist and 

 paleontologist, was the immediate pioneering follower of 

 Cuvier. He was born at Lancaster, July 20, 1804, and died 

 at London, December 18, 1892. While occupying himself 

 considerably in the field of invertebrate work, it was in 

 vertebrate paleontology that Owen made his greatest con- 

 tribution. Many of his works are standard today though 

 his terminology has not always been accepted. 



Next in sequence of importance and time comes 

 Professor Othniel Charles Marsh. He was born October 

 29, 1831, near Lockport, New York and died, March 18, 

 1899 at New Haven, Connecticut. Marsh was the first 

 and greatest of American vertebrate paleontologists. At 

 the time of his death the Peabody Vertebrate Paleon- 

 tological Collection at Yale University, assembled by Pro- 

 fessor Marsh, was the greatest and most complete in the 

 world. 



Living at the same time and producing almost as 

 large and varied a contribution to vertebrate paleontology 

 in America was Professor Edward Drinker Cope. He was 

 born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 28, 1840, and 

 died there April 12, 1897. He explored in the field, dur- 

 ing the period 1871 - 1877, the Cretaceous beds of Kan- 



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CUVIER 



OWEN 



MARSH 



COPE 



