The research history of Palaeotherium is complicated given its extensive fossil record and lengthy taxonomic history, with the earliest record of its fossils dating back to 1782 when the French physicist Robert de Lamanon described the skull of what the naturalist Georges Cuvier described as belonging to P. medium in 1804. Cuvier initially recognized its affinities to tapirs and rhinoceroses and classified fossil material to three different species based on size. From 1805 to 1824, he established additional species based on the morphologies of postcranial remains and drew a reconstructed skeleton of P. magnum in 1824. The fossil mammal genus was the fourth to have been recognized with undisputed taxonomic authority. Palaeotherium had since been a subject of significant attention by many other palaeontologists, and it was gradually revised to be recognized as taxonomically distinct from its other perissodactyl relatives. Since 1804, many species names, valid or invalid, were erected by European and North American naturalists. Palaeotherium was not known by any complete skeleton until when two different skeletons of P. magnum were uncovered in 1873 and the early 20th century, respectively, within France. The most significant taxonomic revisions were conducted by German palaeontologist Jens Lorenz Franzen, then a graduate student, in 1968 when he synonymized many species names and recognized subspecies within the genus based on morphological variations from different species. Although not as strongly influential in modern culture, it is a well-known taxon within European palaeontology and has been acknowledged as an important find in the history of palaeontology.
Early research history
First documentations
The earliest documentation of fossils belonging to Palaeotherium dates back to March 1782 in a scientific journal by the French physicist Robert de Lamanon. The scientist recorded that there were fossils located in the quarries of Montmartre, a large hill near Paris, France. He noted that the fossils were products of animals preserved in deposits that no longer existed. Among the fossils was a skull with both the upper and lower jaws that belonged to the nobleman Philippe-Laurent de Joubert. Lamanon recognized that it had dentition consisting of molars and incisors that were more akin to ruminants than carnivores. Because of the presence of incisors in the fossil animal unlike ruminants and their conical shapes, he hypothesized that the animal had aquatic adaptations but that there are no modern analogues for any extant aquatic animal in terms of dentition. As a result, he proposed the idea that the now-extinct animal was amphibious and fed on both herbs and fish based on the shape of its teeth. Since 1796, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier innovated the idea of vanished worlds of extinct animals, but as his observations of fossils were mostly limited to drawings and very fragmentary fossil materials stored at the National Museum of Natural History, France, his palaeontological insight remained limited early on. The fossils of Montmartre were credited with great importance to the field of palaeontology, as unlike surface-level taxa such as Mammut and Megatherium, those found near Paris were embedded in deeper and harder sediments, falling between the Pleistocene-aged mammals and the Cretaceous-aged reptiles such as Mosasaurus. In 1798, he documented fossils from Montmartre, amongst various other notable fossils worldwide, the former of which he thought initially could have belonged to the canid genus Canis based on its dentition. Not long after in the same year, he changed his mind and thought that the fossil mammal instead would have been within the order of pachyderms, theorizing that it would have been closest to tapirs and that it would have had trunks like them. He also figured out that the animals of Montmartre were of multiple species with different sizes and numbers of toes.
Cuvier's early taxonomy
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