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Sandra R. Schachat (Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution)
In 1809, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published his theory of evolution and asserted that all living organisms share a single common ancestor. In so doing, he laid the initial groundwork for the study of macroevolution in deep time. Today Lamarck is best known for his inability to explain how lineages change gradually, and the microevolutionary theories that he and his colleague Geoffroy proposed are largely erroneous. Thus, during the period between Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, macroevolution was understood in a modern sense whereas microevolution was not. Phylogenies - visualizations of the results of macroevolutionary processes - were published by a number of individuals during the years before Darwin. Visualizations of microevolution are rare and can be difficult to recognize. J.J. Grandville, an early-nineteenth-century French graphic artist who is now best known for his politically charged, oneiric imagery, and who may or may not have been insane, was a follower of Lamarck and Geoffroy. The animal illustrations that Grandville published during 1844 bring Lamarck and Geoffroy’s strange, long-forgotten ideas to life.