A few years later (1780) Blumenbach confirmed Camper's identification, and gave the name of _Elephas primigenius_ to the Siberian mammoth.
"Beckman" [says Blainville] "as early as 1772 had even published a very good memoir on the way in which we should consider fossil organic bodies; he was also the first to propose using the name _fossilia_ instead of _petrefacta_, and to name the science which studies fossils _Oryctology_.

It was also he who admitted that these bodies should be studied with reference to the class, order, genus, species, as we would do with a living being, and he compared them, which he called _prototypes_,[91] with their analogues.

He then passes in review, following the zooelogical order, the fossils which had been discovered by naturalists.

He even described one of them as a new species, besides citing, with an erudition then rare, all the authors and all the works where they were described.

He did no more than to indicate but not name each species.