The great French zoologist Georges Cuvier is usually considered the father of comparative anatomy and palaeontology of vertebrates. He occupied the Chair of Animal Anatomy at the Paris Museum of Natural History. He was a highly influential figure in the French scientific sphere and a tireless critic of the evolutionary theory advanced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), although he never explicitly mentioned the author of the Zoological Philosophy. Cuvier had observed that the fossil flora and fauna in each series of geological layers have their own specific features, different from those of the layers next to them. No forms of transition between one layer and another could be observed. To explain this without recurring to transformism, he hypothesised that the history of the Earth had not been a continuous process, but had undergone violent catastrophes that had caused the extinction of some species. Among his most important works we may mention the Research on fossil bones from 1812, The animal kingdom distributed according to its organisation from 1816 and the Preliminary discourse on the revolutions of the globe from 1821.