Systema Naturae, there is really only one kind of animal—those that exist.
This view persisted despite a sizable body of evidence to the contrary.
Cabinets of curiosities in London, Paris, and Berlin were filled with traces
of strange creatures that no one had ever seen—the remains of animals
that would now be identified as trilobites, belemnites, and ammonites.
Some of the last were so large their fossilized shells approached the size of
wagon wheels. In the eighteenth century, mammoth bones increasingly
made their way to Europe from Siberia. These, too, were shoehorned into
the system. The bones looked a lot like those of elephants. Since there
clearly were no elephants in contemporary Russia, it was decided that
they must have belonged to beasts that had been washed north in the
great flood of Genesis.
Extinction finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally,
in revolutionary France. It did so largely thanks to one animal, the
creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and
one man, the naturalist Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, known
after a dead brother simply as Georges. Cuvier is an equivocal figure in the
history of science. He was far ahead of his contemporaries yet also held
many of them back; he could be charming and he could be vicious; he was
a visionary and, at the same time, a reactionary. By the middle of the
nineteenth century, many of his ideas had been discredited. But the most
recent discoveries have tended to support those very theories of his that
were most thoroughly vilified, with the result that Cuvier’s essentially
tragic vision of earth history has come to seem prophetic.
WHEN, exactly, Europeans first stumbled upon the bones of an
American mastodon is unclear. An isolated molar unearthed in a field in
upstate New York was sent off to London in 1705; it was labeled the “tooth
of a Giant.” The first mastodon bones subjected to what might,
anachronistically, be called scientific study were discovered in 1739. That
year, Charles le Moyne, the second Baron de Longueuil, was traveling
down the Ohio River with four hundred troops, some, like him,