Agassiz, Jean Louis Rodolphe (1807-1873)

Swiss-born US palaeontologist and geologist who developed the idea of the ice age. He established his name through his work on the classification of fossil fishes. Unlike Charles Darwin, he did not believe that individual species themselves changed, but that new species were created from time to time. Agassiz was born in Motier and studied at various European universities. At Paris he adopted French anatomist Georges Cuvier's pioneering application of the techniques of comparative anatomy to palaeontology. In 1832 Agassiz beame professor at Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Moving to the USA 1846, he joined the faculty of Harvard. Travelling in 1836 in the Alps, Agassiz developed the novel idea that glaciers, far from being static, were in a constant state of almost imperceptible motion. Finding rocks that had been shifted or abraded, presumably by glaciers, he inferred that in earlier times much of northern Europe had been covered with ice sheets. Studies on Glaciers 1840 developed the original concept of the ice age, which he viewed as a cause of extinction, demarcating past flora and fauna from those of the present. His book Researches on Fossil Fish 1833-44 described and classified over 1,700 species. Contributions to the Natural History of the United States 1857-62 is an exhaustive study of the American natural environment.