“Father of Paleontology” Georges Cuvier, on Mass Extinctions & Pole Shifts

In my recent book: POLE SHIFT: EVIDENCE WILL NOT BE SILENCED  I include supporting comments from many scientists including early ones like Georges Cuvier

“One of the founders of paleontology, the French zoologist Georges Cuvier, was noted on the first page of this book as a champion of catastrophism: the theory that the Earth’s surface features are best explained by a series of short-lived catastrophes that cause major changes in short periods of time.  Cuvier published a groundbreaking report in 1813 titled: “Essay on the Theory of the Earth.”  It detailed the evidence for his radical and unpopular theories on fossils, the extinction of species, and natural catastrophes that periodically destroy most of the world:

“These repeated eruptions and retreats of the sea have neither been slow nor gradual; most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden; and this is easily proved, especially with regard to the last of them, the traces of which are most conspicuous.  In the northern regions it has left the carcasses of some large quadrupeds which the ice has arrested, and which are preserved even to the present day with their skin, their hair, and their flesh.  If they had not been frozen as soon as killed they must quickly have been decomposed by putrefaction.  But this eternal frost could not have taken possession of the regions which these animals inhabited except by the same cause that destroyed them; this cause, therefore, must have been as sudden as its effect.  The breaking to pieces and overturning of the strata, which happened in former catastrophes, show plainly enough that they were sudden and violent like the last; and the heaps of debris and rounded pebbles which are found in various places among the solid strata, demonstrate the vast force of the motions excited in the mass of waters by these overturnings.  Life, therefore, has often been disturbed on this earth by terrible events – calamities which, at their commencement, have perhaps moved and overturned to a great depth the entire outside crust of the globe.”[i]

In other words: a POLE SHIFT

At another point Cuvier wrote: “It is to fossils that we owe the discovery of the true theory of the earth; without them, we should not have dreamed, perhaps, that the globe was formed at successive epochs, and by a series of different operations.  They alone, in short, tell us with certainty that the globe has not always had the same envelope…”

One of the anonymous book reviews in the London newspapers of early 1814 commenting on Cuvier’s work confronted deeply held religious views and normalcy bias which made the book critic reluctant to accept Cuvier’s numerous groundbreaking conclusions… but he was still able to summarize Cuvier’s thoughts on the young age of the world’s current surface conditions: “The original figure of the earth may have been extremely unlike the present; it may have been vastly irregular; and in the course of changes which it has undergone, the axis of rotation may have changed its position, and have passed through a series of variations…”

“…What has taken place on the surface of the globe since it has been laid dry for the last time, and its continents have assumed their present form, at least as such parts as are somewhat elevated above the level of the ocean, it may be clearly seen that this last revolution, and consequently the establishment of our existing societies, could not have been very ancient.  This result is one of the best established, and least attended to in rational zoology; and it is so much more the valuable, as it connects natural and civil history together…”

[i] Cuvier, Georges. “Essay on the Theory of the Earth.” The Edinburgh Review. Vol. XXII, London, UK: Archibald Constable & Company, 1814, p. 458

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