Karl Rouillier

Rouillier was born in Nizhny Novgorod 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, 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.{{cite journal|author1=Бессуднова, Зоя Антоновна|author2=Стародубцева. Ираида Александровна|title=Карл Францович Рулье. Страницы биографии.|url=https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/karl-frantsovich-rulie-stranitsy-biografii|journal=Бюллетень Московского общества испытателей природы. Отдел геологический|issue=5|year=2014|volume=89|lang=ru}} He followed the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, accepting the inheritance of acquired characters, but differed in postulating the idea of extinction of species.{{Cite journal|last=Weiner|first=Douglas R.|date=1985|title=The roots of 'Michurinism': Transformist biology and acclimatization as currents in the Russian life sciences|url=|journal=Annals of Science|language=en|volume=42|issue=3|pages=243–260|doi=10.1080/00033798500200191|pmid=11620693 |issn=0003-3790}} 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.{{Cite journal|last=Newlin|first=Thomas|date=2020|title=Tropical Moscow. Narratives of Deep Time in Nineteenth-Century Russia|url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304347920300405|journal=Russian Literature|language=en|volume=114-115|pages=175–201|doi=10.1016/j.ruslit.2020.07.009|s2cid=225831922 }} 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.{{Cite journal|last=Rogers|first=James Allen|date=1973|title=The Reception of Darwin's Origin of Species by Russian Scientists|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/229645|journal=Isis|volume=64|issue=4|pages=484–503|doi=10.1086/351177 |jstor=229645 |pmid=4593473 |s2cid=36129302 |issn=0021-1753}}

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 in 1865.{{cite book|author1=Viskova, L.A.|url=http://www.bryozoa.net/annals/annals3/annals_of_bryozoology_3_8_2011_viskova.pdf|author2=Koromyslova,A.V.|journal=Annals of Bryozoology|year=2011|editor1=Jackson, Patrick N. Wyse|volume=3|pages=163–199|chapter=History of the study of Post-Paleozoic bryozoans in Russia (Results and Prospects)|editor2=Jones, Mary E. Spencer Jones}}

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• [https://archive.org/details/terrainjurassiqu00auer/page/n228/mode/1up Études progressives sur la paléontologie des environs de Moscou] (1846)

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Category:1858 deaths

Category:1814 births

Category:19th-century zoologists from the Russian Empire

Category:Academic staff of Moscow State University

Category:19th-century French geologists

Category:Paleontologists