Jules Desnoyers

In 1829 Jules Desnoyers of France, studying sediments in the Seine valley, proposed using the term Quaternary to encompass all of these various post-Tertiary formations. At nearly the same time, the important work of Lyell on the faunal succession of the Paris Basin permitted finer-scaled discrimination of…

… in France by French geologist Jules Desnoyers, who followed an antiquated method of referring to geologic eras as “Primary,” “Secondary,” “Tertiary,” and so on. Beginning with the work of Scottish geologist Charles Lyell in the 1830s, the Quaternary Period was divided into two epochs, the Pleistocene and the Holocene, with…