Mummified animals Napoleon's scientists brought back from Egypt sparked a pre-Darwinian debate about evolution

• Decades before Darwin, there was a debate over transformism, the idea that species change over time.
• Two colleagues at the French natural history museum were on opposite sides of issue.
• They hoped to settle the debate by unwrapping ancient mummies and comparing them to modern ones.

Throughout the early 1800s, the question of whether animals could turn into new species was hotly debated in scientific circles.