After studying the fossils of woolly mammoths and comparing them to the bones of modern-day elephants, Georges Cuvier proposed several new ideas about the history of life on earth. Which general statement can be made about this process of Cuvier?

a) All scientific ideas are made by comparing past and present organisms.

b) Through specific studies, new ideas can be developed.

c) Understanding the past is not important to studying the present.

d) Scientists always discover new ideas when they study details about living things.

The answer to this is A.

As people started to identify fossils around the world they were tied to existing animals by comparing the structures and features of the fossils with the live animals. But at the end of 18 th century, many new fossils emerged that could not be identified as the close match of any existing animals. But most scientists, naturalists and zoologists believed that the animals that are similar to the ones in the fossils existed at some remote part of the world.

George Curvier was the naturalist and scientist who proved that this theory was not true. When the fossil samples of the woolly mammoths emerged, he compared them with the African and Indian Elephants and came to understand that they are completely different. This led him to prove that a major number of species of animals that had walked the Earth has been extinct due to major natural catastrophes like volcanoes, meteor fall etc.

Hence the comparison of the past and the present gives rise to new scientific ideas.