Jean-Baptiste Croizet

Jean-Baptiste Croizet ( January 12, 1787 - April 5, 1859 ) was a French clergyman and paleontologist .

Life

Croizet was a pastor in Neschers ( canton Champeix ). He undertook palaeontological and geological studies in the vicinity of his parish in Auvergne (including the Puy de Dôme ) and corresponded with naturalists such as Georges Cuvier , from whom he was promoted and advised, Alexandre Brongniart and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire . With his friend Antoine Claude Gabriel Jobert, he discovered and described a rich tertiary fossil fauna ( Villafranchium , Pliocene ) in 1828 , which Cuvier examined (with remains of deer, elephants, hippos, tapirs, horses, mastodons, rhinos, bears, tigers, hyenas, beavers , Otters, cattle, etc.). Since no marine influences were recognizable and also no trace of human influence, they did not assign them to a dilluvium (according to the ideas of a flood at the time), as William Buckland had done with his fossil finds in the caves of Kirkland in Yorkshire. In their 1828 book, Jobert and Crouzet made a number of initial descriptions of fossil mammals.

He is also known as an archaeologist: between 1830 and 1848 he discovered 14,000 year old reindeer antlers with a carved horse. It is now in the Natural History Museum in London, where it was neglected for a long time (until around 2010).

Fonts

with ACG Jobert: Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles du département du Puy-de-Dôme, 1828 (dedicated to Cuvier)
Observations générales sur la géologie et la paleontologie, Clermont-Ferrand 1853

literature

Michel Golfier: Jean-Baptiste Croizet, curé de Neschers, paleontologue, 1787–1859, 1998
Martin Rudwick : Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform, University of Chicago Press 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Nescher's Antler

personal data
SURNAME	Croizet, Jean-Baptiste
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French clergyman and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 12, 1787
DATE OF DEATH	April 5, 1859

[1] Nescher's Antler