Karl Rouillier

Karl Franzevich Rouillier or Rul'e (Russian: Карл Францович Рулье; 20 April 1814 – 21 April 1858) was a French-origin zoologist, geologist, paleontologist and professor who introduced ideas and approaches to understanding evolution in Russia, questioning the paradigm of the time of species being fixed and unchanging from the time of Biblical Creation.

Rouillier was born in Nizhny Novgorod to a French shoemaker and his wife, Anna Yakovlevna who worked as a midwife.

[1] He followed the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, accepting the inheritance of acquired characters, but differed in postulating the idea of extinction of species.

[3] Rouillier edited the journal Vestnik estestvennykh nauk (bulletin of natural sciences) which was produced by the Moscow Society of Naturalists from the 1850s.

Still later it was identified as a part of a fossil shark Asteracanthus granulosus by Karl Eduard von Eichwald in 1865.