The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

(Even today, little is known about these species, except that they were
ungulates and lived some thirty million years ago.) “If so many lost
species have been restored in so little time, how many must be supposed
to exist still in the depths of the earth?” Cuvier asked.
Cuvier had a showman’s flair and, long before the museum employed
public relations professionals, knew how to grab attention. (“He was a
man who could have been a star on television today” is how Tassy put it to
me.) At one point, the Parisian gypsum mines yielded a fossil of a rabbit-
sized creature with a narrow body and a squarish head. Cuvier concluded,
based on the shape of its teeth, that the fossil belonged to a marsupial.
This was a bold claim, as there were no known marsupials in the Old
World. To heighten the drama, Cuvier announced he would put his
identification to a public test. Marsupials have a distinctive pair of bones,
now known as epipubic bones, that extend from their pelvis. Though
these bones were not visible in the fossil as it was presented to him,
Cuvier predicted that if he scratched around, the missing bones would be
revealed. He invited Paris’s scientific elite to gather and watch as he
picked away at the fossil with a fine needle. Voilà, the bones appeared. (A
cast of the marsupial fossil is on display in Paris in the paleontology hall,
but the original is deemed too valuable to be exhibited and so is kept in a
special vault.)
Cuvier staged a similar bit of paleontological performance art during a
trip to the Netherlands. In a museum in Haarlem, he examined a specimen
that consisted of a large, half-moon-shaped skull attached to part of a
spinal column. The three-foot-long fossil had been discovered nearly a
century earlier and had been attributed—rather curiously, given the
shape of the head—to a human. (It had even been assigned a scientific
name: Homo diluvii testis, or “man who was witness to the Flood.”) To rebut
this identification, Cuvier first got hold of an ordinary salamander
skeleton. Then, with the approval of the Haarlem museum’s director, he
began chipping away at the rock around the “deluge man’s” spine. When
he uncovered the fossil animal’s forelimbs, they were, just as he had