He then investigated the rich deposit of fossil vertebrata at Pikermi and brought to light a remarkable mammalian fauna, Miocene in age, and intermediate in its forms between European, Asiatic and African types.

[6] Later Gaudry helped Thomas write the Essai d'une description géologique de la Tunisie, which reported the results of the Tunisian research.

[9] Professor Huxley, comparing our present knowledge of the mammals of the Tertiary era with that of 1859, states that the discoveries of Gaudry, Marsh, and Filhol, are "as if zoologists were to become acquainted with a country hitherto unknown, as rich in novel forms of life as Brazil or South America once were to Europeans.

In his book Essai de paléontologie philosophique (1896) he considered evolution to be a divine plan guided by God.

[12] Charles Darwin cited Gaudry's palaeontological research from his excavations at Pikermi in the second edition of On Origin of Species, 1872 and The Descent of Man, 1871.

[3][17] Paleontologist Éric Buffetaut has written that "Gaudry's strong religious feelings made it difficult for him to accept Darwin's mechanistic vision of an evolution based on chance and natural selection.

[1] Source: Woodward 1911 If we recognise that organised beings have little by little been transformed, we shall regard them as plastic substances which an artist has been pleased to knead during the immense course of ages, lengthening here, broadening or diminishing there, as the sculptor, with a piece of clay, produces a thousand forms, following the impulse of his genius.