Charles Darwin used evidence he found from research and studying the work of other scientists who studied fossils to support his claim that modern organisms are the descendants of ancestral species that were different from those of today. Darwin based his ideas on the work of Nicolas Steno ,a 1600’s anatomist working in Italy. He dated rock by saying the oldest layers were the deepest layers (“Understanding Evolution: Nicholas Steno”) He thought that Fossils were snapshots of life at different moments in earth’s history. Steno was struck by how similar shark teeth …show more content…
He then discovered that the “tongue stones” did indeed come from the mouths of previous living sharks. When Steno looked at a elephant fossil he saw that it wasn't the same species of living elephants. It was much different Georges Cuvier a French naturalist and zoologist in the 1700’s joined the fledgling Nation Museum in Paris in 1795 and became the world’s leading expert on the anatomy of Animals, He found that some animals just vanish, He called this extinction. He was referred to as the father of “paleontology” He found after looking at fossils that a mass extinction is very possible Georges Cuvier was a main contributor to Extinction. While Darwin was in South Africa he saw that many of the fossils there proved to be extinct relatives of some of the life in modern Southern American Organisms (Weiner 29) . Darwin then said these fossils were relatives but they were not the exact same because of some differences of the organisms. He figured the elephants were