 It also supported the idea that the Earth's climate had changed over time as Brongniart concluded that plant fossils showed that during the Carboniferous the climate of Northern Europe must have been tropical.The increasing attention being paid to fossil plants in the first decades of the 19th century would trigger a significant change in the terminology for the study of past life.The editor of the influential French scientific journal, "Journal de Physique", a student of Cuvier's named Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, coined the term "paleozoologie" in 1817 to refer to the work Cuvier and others were doing to reconstruct extinct animals from fossil bones.