Determining the relationships of fossils with rock strata
The hypothesis of fossil succession in the work of Georges Cuvier
During this period of confrontation between the proponents of Neptunism and uniformitarianism, there emerged evidence resulting from a lengthy and detailed study of the fossiliferous strata of the Paris Basin that rock successions were not necessarily complete records of past geologic events. In fact, significant breaks frequently occur in the superpositional record. These breaks affect not only the lithologic character of the succession but also the character of the fossils found in the various strata.
An 1812 study by the French zoologist Georges Cuvier was prescient in its recognition that fossils do in fact record events in Earth history and serve as more than just “follies” of nature. Cuvier’s thesis, based on his analysis of the marine invertebrate and terrestrial vertebrate fauna of the Paris Basin, showed conclusively that many fossils, particularly those of terrestrial vertebrates, had no living counterparts. Indeed, they seemed to represent extinct forms, which, when viewed in the context of the succession of strata with which they were associated, constituted part of a record of biological succession punctuated by numerous extinctions. These, in turn, were followed by a seeming renewal of more advanced but related forms and were separated from each other by breaks in the associated rock record. Many of these breaks were characterized by coarser, even conglomeratic strata following a break, suggesting “catastrophic” events that may have contributed to the extinction of the biota. Whatever the actual cause, Cuvier felt that the evidence provided by the record of faunal succession in the Paris Basin could be interpreted by invoking recurring catastrophic geologic events, which in turn contributed to recurring massive faunal extinction, followed at a later time by biological renewal.
William Smith’s work with faunal sequence
As Cuvier’s theory of faunal succession was being considered, William Smith, a civil engineer from the south of England, was also coming to realize that certain fossils can be found consistently associated with certain strata. In the course of evaluating various natural rock outcroppings, quarries, canals, and mines during the early 1790s, Smith increasingly utilized the fossil content as well as the lithologic character of various rock strata to identify the successional position of different rocks, and he made use of this information to effect a correlation among various localities he had studied. The consistency of the relationships that Smith observed eventually led him to conclude that there is indeed faunal succession and that there appears to be a consistent progression of forms from more primitive to more advanced. As a result of this observation, Smith was able to begin what was to amount to a monumental effort at synthesizing all that was then known of the rock successions outcropping throughout parts of Great Britain. This effort culminated in the publication of his “Geologic Map of England, Wales and Part of Scotland” (1815), a rigorous treatment of diverse geologic information resulting from a thorough understanding of geologic principles, including those of original horizontality, superposition (lithologic, or rock, succession), and faunal succession. With this, it now became possible to assume within a reasonable degree of certainty that correlation could be made between and among widely separated areas. It also became apparent that many sites that had previously been classified according to the then-traditional views of Arduino, Füchsel, and Lehmann did not conform to the new successional concepts of Smith.
Early attempts at mapping and correlation
The seminal work of Smith at clarifying various relationships in the interpretation of rock successions and their correlations elsewhere resulted in an intensive look at what the rock record and, in particular, what the fossil record had to say about past events in the long history of the Earth. A testimony to Smith’s efforts in producing one of the first large-scale geologic maps of a region is its essential accuracy in portraying what is now known to be the geologic succession for the particular area of Britain covered.
The application of the ideas of Lyell, Smith, Hutton, and others led to the recognition of lithologic and paleontologic successions of similar character from widely scattered areas. It also gave rise to the realization that many of these similar sequences could be correlated.
The French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, in particular, was able to demonstrate the similarity of fauna from a number of Cuvier’s and Alexandre Brongniart’s collections of fossils from the Paris Basin with fossil fauna from the sub-Apennines of Italy and the London Basin. While based mainly on the collections of Cuvier and Brongniart, Lamarck’s observations provided much more insight into the real significance of using fossils strictly for correlation purposes. Lamarck disagreed with Cuvier’s interpretation of the meaning of faunal extinction and regeneration in stratigraphic successions. Not convinced that catastrophes caused massive and widespread disruption of the biota, Lamarck preferred to think of organisms and their distribution in time and space as responding to the distribution of favourable habitats. If confronted with the need to adapt to abrupt changes in local habitat—Cuvier’s catastrophes—faunas must be able to change in order to survive. If not, they became extinct. Lamarck’s approach, much like that of Hutton, stressed the continuity of processes and the continuum of the stratigraphic record. Moreover, his view that organisms respond to the conditions of their environment had important implications for the uniformitarian approach to interpreting Earth history.
Once it was recognized that many of the rocks of the Paris Basin, London Basin, and parts of the Apennines apparently belonged to the same sequence by virtue of the similarity of their fossil content, Arduino’s term Tertiary (proposed as part of his fourfold division of rock succession in the Tuscan Hills of Italy) began to be applied to all of these diverse locations. Further work by Lyell and Gérard-Paul Deshayes resulted in the term Tertiary being accepted as one of the fundamental divisions of geologic time.