Karl Franzevich Rouillier or Rul'e (; 20 April 1814 – 21 April 1858) was a French-origin zoologist, geologist, paleontologist and professor who introduced ideas and approaches to understanding evolution in Russia, questioning the paradigm of the time of species being fixed and unchanging from the time of

Biblical Creation The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth of both Judaism and Christianity. The narrative is made up of two stories, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first, Elohim (the Hebrew generic word ...

Life and work

Rouillier was born in

Nizhny Novgorod Nizhny Novgorod ( ; rus, links=no, Нижний Новгород, a=Ru-Nizhny Novgorod.ogg, p=ˈnʲiʐnʲɪj ˈnovɡərət ), colloquially shortened to Nizhny, from the 13th to the 17th century Novgorod of the Lower Land, formerly known as Gork ...

to a French shoemaker and his wife, Anna Yakovlevna who worked as a midwife. He studied medicine in Moscow where his teachers included

Fischer von Waldheim Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim (russian: Григо́рий Ива́нович Фи́шер фон Ва́льдгейм, translit=Grigórij Ivánovič Fíšer fon Vál'dgejm; 13 October 1771 – 18 October 1853) was a Saxon anatomist, entomol ...

, and Iustin Dyadkovsky (1784–1841). He graduated and became a military doctor in 1833. In 1840 he became a professor of zoology at the Moscow University. From 1842 he began to teach paleontology using material in the museum at Moscow University. In order to make the collections more useful, he began to obtain new material from the Moscow region. He found different faunas at different locations and separated the new fossils according to the ages that he assigned based on strata. He also suggested that were changes in climatic conditions at different time. He followed the work of

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1 August 1744 – 18 December 1829), often known simply as Lamarck (; ), was a French naturalist, biologist, academic, and soldier. He was an early proponent of the idea that biologi ...

and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, accepting the inheritance of acquired characters, but differed in postulating the idea of extinction of species. Rouillier was a good public orator and gave lectures to the general public. Because he came against scripture, he was censured by the Tsarist government. He also clashed with another geologist Ivan Auerbach who initially attacked Rouillier under a pseudonym. Rouillier edited the journal ''Vestnik estestvennykh nauk'' (bulletin of natural sciences) which was produced by the Moscow Society of Naturalists from the 1850s. This journal would carry one of the earliest summaries of Darwin's publication. Darwin had never heard of Rouillier or his works. Rouillier was among the first to obtain fossils of a supposed bryozoan from the Moscow Jurassic. He however identified it as a placoderm fish and gave the name ''Bothriolepis jurensis'' Rouillier, 1847. Later, Trautschold thought it was a sea urchin and called it ''Rhabdocidaris remus'' Trautschold, 1861. Still later it was identified as a part of a fossil shark ''Asteracanthus granulosus'' by

Karl Eduard von Eichwald ), present-day Latvia , death_date = , death_place = St. Petersburg, Russia , citizenship = Russian Empire , nationality = Baltic German , fields = GeologyMedicine , workplaces = Kazan University, V ...

in 1865.

References

External links

Études progressives sur la paléontologie des environs de Moscou
(1846) {{DEFAULTSORT:Rouillier, Karl 1858 deaths 1814 births 19th-century zoologists from the Russian Empire Academic staff of Moscow State University 19th-century French geologists Paleontologists