It must be admitted, therefore, that the statement generally made that Cuvier was the founder of this science should be somewhat modified, though he may be regarded as the chief founder of vertebrate palaeontology.
In this field, however, Cuvier had his precursors not only in Germany and Holland, but also in France.
Our information as to the history of the rise of vertebrate palaeontology is taken from Blainville's posthumous work entitled _Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire_.[87] In this work, a severe critical and perhaps not always sufficiently appreciative account of Cuvier's character and work, we find an excellent history of the first beginnings of vertebrate palaeontology.

Blainville has little or nothing to say of the first steps in invertebrate palaeontology, and, singularly enough, not a word of Lamarck's principles and of his papers and works on fossil shells--a rather strange oversight, because he was a friend and admirer of Lamarck, and succeeded him in one of the two departments of invertebrates created at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle after Lamarck's death.
Blainville, who by the way was the first to propose the word _palaeontology_, shows that the study of the great extinct mammals had for forty years been held in great esteem in Germany, before Faujas and Cuvier took up the subject in France.

Two Frenchmen, also before 1789, had examined mammalian bones.

Thus Bernard de Jussieu knew of the existence in a fossil state of the teeth of the hippopotamus.
Guettard[88] published in 1760 a memoir on the fossil bones of Aix en Provence.

Lamanon (1780-1783)[89] in a beautiful memoir described a head, almost entire, found in the gypsum beds of Paris.