Mammuthus Primigenius

On this day in 1769 Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier, better known as Georges Cuvier, was born. Cuvier became an extremely accomplished naturalist and zoologist and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils. He is sometimes referred to as the "father of paleontology".

One of Cuvier’s accomplishments was the identification in 1796 of the woolly mammoth as a distinct, extinct species and that mammoth remain did not, as had been previously thought, belong to elephants that had wandered or been transported north. This concept was not widely accepted at the time.

In 1799 the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave the woolly mammoth its first scientific name, Elephas primigenius, placing it in the same genus as the Asian elephant. Cuvier  would coin the name Elephas mammonteus a few months later, but it did not replace Blumenbach’s. In 1828, the British naturalist Joshua Brookes used the name Mammuthus borealis for woolly mammoth fossils, thereby coining a new genus name. The woolly mammoth, which lived in Europe and North America and would eventually become extinct during the late Pleistocene / early Holocene  is now known by the scientific name Mammuthus primigenius.

This scene was built by James Pegrum because he wanted to build a mammoth. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to see all of our models first.