The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

apparently reminded him of nipples. (By this point, the animal had
already received a scientific name from a German naturalist;
unfortunately this name—Mammut americanum—has perpetuated the
confusion between mastodons and mammoths.)
Despite the ongoing hostilities between the British and the French,
Cuvier managed to obtain detailed drawings of the skeleton Peale’s sons
had taken to London, and these gave him a much better picture of the
animal’s anatomy. He realized that the mastodon was far more distant
from modern elephants than the mammoth, and assigned it to a new
genus. (Today, mastodons are given not only their own genus but their
own family.) In addition to the American mastodon, Cuvier identified four
other mastodon species, “all equally strange to the earth today.” Peale
didn’t learn of Cuvier’s new name until 1809, and when he did, he
immediately seized on it. He wrote to Jefferson proposing a “christening”
for the mastodon skeleton in his Philadelphia museum. Jefferson was
lukewarm about the name Cuvier had come up with—it “may be as good
as any other,” he sniffed—and didn’t deign to respond to the idea of a
christening.
In 1812, Cuvier published a four-volume compendium of his work on
fossil animals: Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes. Before
he’d begun his “researches,” there had been—depending upon who was
doing the counting—zero or one extinct vertebrate. Thanks for the most
part to his own efforts, there were now forty-nine.
As Cuvier’s list grew, so, too, did his renown. Few naturalists dared to
announce their findings in public until he had vetted them. “Is not Cuvier
the greatest poet of our century?” Honoré de Balzac would ask. “Our
immortal naturalist has reconstructed worlds from a whitened bone;
rebuilt, like Cadmus, cities from a tooth.” Cuvier was honored by
Napoleon and, once the Napoleonic Wars finally ended, was invited to
Britain, where he was presented at court.
The English were eager converts to Cuvier’s project. In the early years
of the nineteenth century, fossil collecting became so popular among the