The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

the Charles Island tortoise or, to continue the list, the dodo or the Steller’s
sea cow? These animals had obviously not been done in by a rival species
gradually evolving some competitive advantage. They had all been killed
off by the same species, and all quite suddenly—in the case of the great
auk and the Charles Island tortoise over the course of Darwin’s own
lifetime. Either there had to be a separate category for human-caused
extinction, in which case people really did deserve their “special status” as
a creature outside of nature, or space in the natural order had to be made
for cataclysm, in which case, Cuvier—distressingly—was right.