 The term "paleobotany" was coined in 1884 and "palynology" in 1944.In Cuvier's landmark 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, he referred to a single catastrophe that destroyed life to be replaced by the current forms.As a result of his studies of extinct mammals, he realized that animals such as "Palaeotherium" had lived before the time of the mammoths, which led him to write in terms of multiple geological catastrophes that had wiped out a series of successive faunas.