TLW's Zoologistscope™ (Zoologist Historyscope) |
By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper™ |
© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. |
Original Pub. Date: Jan. 9, 2017. Last Update: Jan. 10, 2017. |
Westerners are not only known as history ignoramuses, but double dumbass history ignoramuses when it comes to zoologist history. Since I'm the one-and-only Historyscoper (tm), let me quickly bring you up to speed before you dive into my Master Historyscope.
In 1553 French naturalist Peter Baleen, er, Pierre Belon (1517-64) pub. De Aquatilibus, the first scientific study of marine animals, revealing that cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) breathe air with lungs, and other shocking discoveries.
In Apr. 1796 French naturalist Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) gives the lecture Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles at the Nat. Inst. (pub. in 1800), comparing skeletons of Indian and African elephants, and mastodons ("the Ohio animal"), which he concludes are all different species, the latter extinct; in 1806 he coins the name "mastodon"; he also describes a large skeleton found in Paraguay, which he names the Megatherium, claiming it is an extinct variety of the tree-dwelling sloth, ending the debate about whether extinction has actually happened, and founding Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology. In 1798 he pub. Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux, becoming the first attempt at systematic classification of the animal kingdom, founding modern Zoology (Comparative Anatomy), stressing how the parts of an organism are correlated to the functioning whole. In 1812 he pub. Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles de Quadrupedes (Researches on Quadruped Fossil Bones), issuing his "rash dictum" that it is unlikely tht any large animal remained undiscovered. In 1813 he pub. Essay on the Theory of the Earth, which advances the theory of catastrophism in geology, claiming that new species were created after periodic catastrophic floods after establishing the fact of past extinction. In 1817 he pub. Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) (4 vols.), his magnum opus, a summation of his life's work on comparative anatomy, containing apparent support for evolutionary change for the extinct mammoths et al., making a fan of Charles Darwin, although Cuvier rejects the idea of evolution.
In 1973 British geneticist Hans Gruneberg (Grüneberg) (1907-82) of the U.S. discovers the Gruneberg Ganglion at the tip of mammal noses, which later is found to detect alarm pheromones emitted by others of the same species.