Cuvier wrote of the extinction of the mammoths: "Repeated irruptions and reteats of the sea have neither all been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proved with regard to the last of these catastrophes, that which, by a twofold motion, has inundated, and afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or at least a part of the land which forms them at the present day. In the northern regions it has left the carcasses of large quadrupeds which became enveloped in the ice, and have thus been preserved even to our own times, with their skin, their hair, and their flesh. If they had not been frozen as soon as killed, they would have been decomposed by putrefacation. And, on the other hand, this eternal frost could not previously have occupied the places in which they had been seized by it, for they could not have lived in such a temperature. It was, therefore, at one and the same moment that these animals were destroyed and the country which they inhabited became covered with ice. This event has been sudden, instantaneous, without any gradation, and what is so clearly demonstrated with respect to this last catastrophe, is not less so with reference to those which have preceded it."
Velikovsky, 1950:37.