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Vanished

Vanished An Unnatural History of Extinction

Sadiah Qureshi

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DEDICATION

Reader, let us create worthwhile futures. Amid vanishing possibilities, we can still choose redress, reciprocity, and renewal.

List of Illustrations

Prologue The head of a dodo. Coloured stipple engraving. Wellcome Collection.

1.1 Jardin des plantes. Wellcome Collection.

1.2 Megatherium, Natural History Museum, London. © Sadiah Qureshi.

1.3 Skeleton of the Missouri Leviathan, or American Incognitum. Watercolour, possibly by G. Tytler, c. 1842. Wellcome Collection.

1.4 Scholars attending a lecture by Buckland in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Coloured lithograph printed by C. Hullmandel after N. Whittock. Wellcome Collection

1.5 Mary Anning’s autograph letter concerning the discovery of plesiosaurus, from Mary Anning; sketch of plesiosaurus. Wellcome Collection.

1.6 Megalosaurus teeth and lower jaw, by M. Moreland, c. 1822. Lithograph, c. 1822. Wellcome Collection.

1.7 Animals and plants of Dorset in the Liassic period. Lithograph by G. Scharf after H. T. de la Bèche. Wellcome Collection.

1.8 Richard Owen standing next to the skeleton of the Dinornis maximus (the extinct New Zealand moa). Halftone after J. Smit after a photograph, c. 1877. Wellcome Collection.

1.9 The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, print by G. Baxter, c. 1864. Wellcome Collection

2.1 Shanawdithit, c. 1820s. From J. P. Howley, The Beothucks, or Red Indians, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland (1915).

2.2 Santu Toney, with her son Joe Toney. From F. G. Speck, Beothuk and Micmac (1922).

3.1 George Catlin, Picturesque Bluffs above Prairie du Chien (1835–6). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs Joseph Harrison, Jr.

3.2 Thomas Moran, Yellowstone Lake, c. 1875. © Library of Congress.

List of Illustrations

4.1 Handbill for the exhibition of the ‘Human Fossil’. © Geological Society of London, LDGSL /547: image number 10-03. Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of London.

4.2 The Anthropomorpha. From Caroli Linné, Amoenitates academicae (1787). Wellcome Collection.

4.3 A human hierarchy constructed using the facial angle from ape to Apollo. From Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique (1791). Wellcome Collection.

4.4 Huxley’s drawing of the Neanderthal skull cast. From T. H. Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (1863). © Sadiah Qureshi.

5.1 Drawings of Australian fauna and flora from the voyages of Joseph Banks. Australia: above, a kangaroo; below, a common ringtail possum. Etching by C. Grignion, c. 1788. Wellcome Collection.

5.2 A map of Australia highlighting the places where Daisy Bates conducted her research. From D. Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines, 2nd Australian ed. (1947).

5.3 Darian D. Smith. ‘Mrs Daisy Bates at her desk in Adelaide, South Australia’ (1941). © State Library of Victoria, public domain.

5.4 Glass phial labelled as containing the ‘Hair of Extinct Tasmanian Aboriginal’. Wellcome Collection.

6.1 Steller’s sea cow, from Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters (1893).

6.2 A thylacine, probably in Hobart Zoo (1930). Item number PH 30/1/5846. © Libraries of Tasmania, public domain.

7.1 A fossil of the Devonian trilobite Phacops rana © Wikimedia Commons.

9.1 Martha’s afterlife as a museum specimen. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 44, Folder 04, Image No. SIA 000095_ B44_F04_013.

10.1 The Natural History Museum, South Kensington: plan, above, and the street elevation, below. Photo­lithograph after M. B. Adams, 1879, after A. Waterhouse. Wellcome Collection.

10.2 Hope, the blue whale, Natural History Museum, London. © Sadiah Qureshi.

10.3 Koch’s Missouri Leviathan, or the American mastodon, Natural History Museum, London. © Sadiah Qureshi.

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List of Illustrations

11.1 The spotted green pigeon, from John Latham, A General History of Birds, vol. 3 (1823).

11.2 Labels tracing the collection and classification of the Liverpool pigeon, World Museum, Liverpool. © Sadiah Qureshi.

11.3 An endangered Sumatran tiger in the hall of extinct species, Museum of Natural History, Paris. © Sadiah Qureshi.

Prologue

Extinction’s Pasts

The Mascarene Islands nestle together in the Indian Ocean. More than four hundred kilometres off the coast of Mozambique sits Madagascar, east of which the trio of Réunion, Mauritius, and Rodrigues islands rise above an underwater plateau of volcanoes whose eruptions 65 million years ago formed India’s Deccan traps. Mauritius emerged from the sea between 8 and 10 million years ago, while Rodrigues and Réunion are only about 2 million years old. The islands are known for their azure waters, sunny beaches, and unique wildlife.

Millions of years ago, a pigeon spent time hopping between the Mascarene Islands. The bird’s descendants took to the ground, lost the ability to fly, developed large beaks to forage for fruit, grew so tall and heavy they took to nesting on the ground, and diverged enough to become unique to their island homes: the Mauritian Dodo and the Rodrigues Solitaire. These, and many other unique beings, lived without human presence for millions of years. Arab traders knew of Mauritius for at least five centuries, but never settled there. The Portuguese arrived in 1507, while the Dutch used the island as a pitstop on their oceanic voyages from 1598. They found an island with no mammals and introduced prolifically fertile cats, dogs, monkeys, goats, swine, and rats. Isolation had made the dodo so unafraid of outsiders that sailors took the bird by hand to make easy meals and, occasionally, ship the living curiosity to Europe, Japan, and India. Laying only one egg a year, dodos bred slowly and their population plummeted in the maws of ravenous intruders. A shipwrecked sailor made the last confirmed sighting of a dodo in 1662, and the bird was soon extinct, probably by the 1690s.1 The solitaire survived a while longer, but was also extinct by the 1770s, and possibly earlier.2

Prologue: Extinction’s Pasts

Memories of the ‘strange fowle’ faded so fast that the dodo was dismissed as grotesque imagination until nineteenth­century naturalists meticulously documented the bird’s presence in travelogues, museum drawers, and art collections. They concluded that dodos were ‘almost contemporaries of our great­grandfathers’, and the ‘first clearly attested’ extinction ‘through human agency’.3 While caches of dodo bones first found in 1865 yielded enough material for the construction of composite skeletons, no complete specimen exists. The only known soft tissue is a mummified head of uncertain provenance, but probably from a bird once exhibited in London. Around 1638, the politician and writer Sir Hamon L’Estrange observed:

. . . as I walked London streets, I saw the picture of a strange fowle hung out upon a clothe and myselfe with one or two more in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turkey cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of a dunn or dearc colour. The keeper called it a Dodo . 4

L’Estrange’s brief note is the only known record of a living dodo in London. After the bird died, possibly by a gunshot to the back of the head, its skin was preserved and probably sold to a father and son named John Tradescant. A pair of gardeners with a penchant for collecting, their cabinet of curiosities was open to anyone with a sixpence to spare in London and known as the Tradescant Ark. After the elder’s death, the son sold the treasures to the keen collector Elias Ashmole in 1659. He later offered his ‘rarities’, including the Ark, to the University of Oxford on condition that they were housed in a purpose­built museum. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683, possibly as the last few dodos eked out their existence in Mauritius. The skin of the Tradescants’ dodo suffered damage, probably from handling and gnawing critters, and by the mid­eighteenth century the skin was no longer whole.

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In the mid­nineteenth century, the dodo’s remnants and other natural history specimens were moved yet again to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.5 Founded in 1850, the museum provided a focal point for scholars of the natural sciences in a university then dominated by theology, philosophy, and classics. Fossils, stuffed skins, and mined minerals were showcased in an extraordinary building that opened in 1860. The museum tower houses a colony of swifts whose joyful screeches have marked the summer months for decades. Inside, the light­filled galleries teem with glass cabinets, minerals, and skeletons of extinct and living beasts. One cabinet features a lifesize model of the dodo, while the giftshop features numerous dodo­themed keepsakes. The Oxford Dodo lies away from the public’s gaze in a secret location. Only accessible by appointment, the Oxford Dodo is an assortment of precious remains: a skull partially sheathed in a mummified skin, an incomplete eye, a foot, a femur, and a single feather so minuscule it resembles an iridescent needle. I was familiar with the specimen from nineteenth­century drawings in which the light touch of artistic hands made the bird look asleep, but even modern photographs did not prepare me for the shock of encountering its desiccated and brittle skin and frail bill in person. As a historian of science, race, and empire, I have encountered life’s relics in museums for as long

The head of the Oxford dodo.

Prologue: Extinction’s Pasts

as I can remember, but seeing one of the world’s most distinctive ways of being, and famous victims of extinction, reduced to such grotesque fragility made me gasp and well up with tears.

Extinction extinguishes ways of being: distinct lifeways that might exist for untold millennia, even millions of years, before vanishing. Ways of being are a coalescence of possibilities, a quickening of leaf, wing, scale, and bone into lives we call ‘trees’, ‘bees’, ‘sharks’, ‘tigers’, or ‘human’.6 Each one is perpetuated by living, reproducing, and growing in communities over innumerable generations. Every way of being is connected to other lives through countless functions, whether as predator, prey, parent, or partner, that create significant relationships between lifeways. Sometimes descendants depart incrementally from ancestral ways, giving rise to new forms, until they appear distinctive enough for us to notice the difference, and perhaps even to designate them a species. The multiple technical definitions used to describe species are a human invention –  a way of categorizing life on earth. We usually discuss extinction as the loss of species, but this often obscures how it robs the world of distinctive existences, many far older than any nation, humanity, and even earth’s continents.

We will never know how many ways of being once thrived on earth, but you are a survivor of many episodes of catastrophic dying. Geologists currently date the earth to around 4.6 billion years old. The oldest known fossils are dated to about 3.5 billion years old, but carbon residues probably produced by living forms are known from as early as 4.1 billion years ago.7 Since then innumerable ways of being have found ways to live and flourish, from bacteria living in extreme temperatures in ocean depths, to the birds, plants, and fungi we see and hear around us every day. Earth’s past is punctuated by numerous extinctions, meaning all life on earth is descended from just the tenth of species that geologists regard as the survivors of past calamities. A complete catalogue of life is impossible, but fossils provide reliable snapshots of life’s diversity and many ways of being before we were ever conscious of their existence. By 2023, biologists had distinguished 2.1 million living species and 250,000

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fossil species, but their best estimates for the total number of living species was 8.75 million (including 7.8 million animals, 298,000 plants, and 611,000 fungi), with some suspecting up to 10 million species may once have existed.8 While birds and mammals are comprehensively named and known, other kinds, such as invertebrates, insects, fungi, or microbes, remain relatively neglected mysteries.

Even if all living species were named, from the blue whale to every microbe, they are a fraction of the once living. Many lives were rendered unknowable in ‘dark extinctions’: an evocative phrase describing the loss of species before humans were aware of their existence, whether in ancient lost worlds or more recently. In 2021 the scientists Mannfred Boehm and Quentin Cronk used rates of species discovery and known species extinctions to estimate ‘the extinction of undescribed species’. They subdivided recent human history into a ‘pre­taxonomic period’ stretching from 1500 to 1800, essentially including a substantial period of European colonization and collection of species, and a ‘taxonomic period’ from 1800 to the present day to adjust for variations in the quality of data. They estimated that at least fifty­six unknown species were lost after 1800, whereas another 180 were lost in the previous three centuries. These ‘dark extinctions’ were in addition to the 178 documented bird extinctions after 1500, and many were caused by humans. Occasionally, those species will appear in the fossil record, in museum drawers, or even found alive, while others leave no trace to be known or named.9

Extinction is an important marker of humanity’s devastating environmental impact in recent centuries. Fears that we have instigated the sixth mass extinction by overpopulating the earth with our own kind, propagating invasive species, causing pollution, unsustainably harvesting natural resources, causing climate change through destroying natural habitats, and emitting greenhouse gases are familiar to us by now. Responses to earth’s plight and the prospect of human extinction range from outright denial and refusal to admit culpability, to sanguine expectations that new technologies will save us, or panic at the prospect of approaching self­annihilation through nuclear war or ecocide. Many fight extinction through

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conservation or trying to resurrect lost species through ‘deextinction’. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT, pronounced ‘vehement’) encourages us to hasten our demise and trigger earth’s recovery by choosing not to have children.10 It is no wonder that so many people feel compelled to take advantage of the last chance to see certain species such as the northern white rhino, or create archives of the dying while trying to make meaning out of loss, grief, panic, and hope. As each way of being slips away from us, we are increasingly likely to be aware of the disappearance as conservation biologists list species in peril and media outlets publish annual updates of the previous year’s extinctions.11 In 2023, for example, the Campo Grande Treefrog of Brazil, Pointed Plateau Loach fish of China, and Java Stingaree stingray of Indonesia were all declared extinct.

Whether playing with toy dinosaurs or visiting natural history museums, even young children are familiar with extinction; encountering such loss is often emotional and upsetting, and remains so as we learn of ever more species doomed to the same fate. Many of us remember the first time we realized a wondrous creature we admired was no longer living, and often that moment involved learning of the dinosaurs’ fate. Encountering extinction primarily through prehistoric loss can trick us into imagining extinction as a primarily biological process or catastrophic loss caused by natural disasters. While understandable, this underplays how we contribute to and make sense of extinction. No other species conceives of itself as in danger of extinction. No other species attempts to prevent the extinction of other ways of being, counts them as they disappear, tries to revive those already lost, or frets over its culpability. No other species produces elegiac artforms, or holds ceremonies such as the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, established in 2011 and held every 30 November, to mourn such loss.12

How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish for ever, or as capable of plunging our planet into a sixth mass extinction? And how has this understanding of extinction shaped how we imagine our histories, our place

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in the world, and role in shaping our planet? By tracing how we have made meaning from, and decisions about, extinction, Vanished suggests that histories of extinction are a valuable intellectual and ethical endeavour that allow us to understand the entangled roots of extinction, empire, and race in the making of the modern world. Present­day conversations about extinction are dominated by discussions of species loss, but this is a relatively new historical turn. The act of extinguishing was often called ‘extinction’ in the sixteenth century. From emotional lives to fiery embers, extinction denoted deliberately snuffing out passions or brightness. Likewise, from wills to family trees, extinction might refer to a lineage dying out, perhaps coupled with the loss of a family surname or hereditary title. We might still come across this legacy with someone fretting over carrying on the family name, particularly by those with rare surnames. Occasionally, lists of first names on the verge of extinction circulate on social media or the popular press as parents switch to more fashionable alternatives.13 Extinction might describe the settling of a debt or score, or an expunging of a moral and political obligation to make good on promises. From the 1700s onwards, and particularly in the nineteenth century, as calls for the abolition of enslavement grew, commentators were increasingly likely to call for the extinction of both the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and enslavement itself.14 Those extinctions were lamentably slow and still demand true reckoning and reparation.15

In late eighteenth­century Europe and America, extinction slowly came to mean species loss. Naturalists and theologians of the period usually regarded species as stable, unchanging, natural kinds created by God. The notion they might change, let alone develop into a new species or vanish for ever, was considered implausible at best, and even ungodly or atheistic. When species were believed lost, such as the dodo, their passing was usually attributed to human exploitation leading to ‘extirpation’, ‘eradication’, or ‘extermination’. Over the nineteenth century, naturalists, theologians, philosophers, and the broader public shifted from primarily blaming humanity to theorizing extinction as a process of routine, recurrent, and ubiquitous loss

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inherent in the natural world. Extinction shifted from being a theologically perilous idea to a natural law ostensibly ordained by God. By the later nineteenth century, naturalists debating the nature of natural extinction recognized that humanity was also causing profoundly unnatural extinctions of once prolific species, such as the great auk or passenger pigeon, creating new fears about vanishing species. By the mid­twentieth century, biologists were increasingly concerned with counting and categorizing the degrees of threat faced by species on the brink of disappearing. As the environmental movement flourished during the Cold War, geologists suggested life on earth had experienced five catastrophic mass extinctions that annihilated many groups, including the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. By the 1980s, a new generation of conservation biologists reframed species loss as an urgent problem of diminishing diversity of life on earth. Once concerns about biodiversity and the planet’s future were intertwined, they helped substantiate terrifying claims that humanity’s carelessness meant everyone in the present was living through earth’s sixth mass extinction.16 Tracing the history of extinction as species loss is important, but we should not allow this to overshadow other subjects.

Many white naturalists and colonists in the nineteenth century argued that colonized peoples were on the verge of extinction. Effectively, these writers conflated natural biological extinction with unnatural imperial extermination to suggest that colonized peoples across the world could not, and would not, survive the expansion of European settler colonies. The legacies of those claims are still with us as many colonized peoples are said to be extinct: the Beothuk in Newfoundland, numerous Native nations in North America, and the Aboriginal Tasmanians are among the most frequently named in histories of European imperialism and genocide studies. Yet, colonized peoples and species are rarely discussed together as the subjects of scientific debates about extinction, despite the fact that nineteenth­century writers often conflated extermination with extinction. In some ways this is understandable because it risks implying that colonized peoples are not fully human or are

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even bestial, which would perpetuate profoundly racist stereotypes that must not be given any credence. However, by treating human extermination and animal extinction as separate historical developments, historians have overlooked an exceptionally important shift. This book argues that the shifting epistemic status of animal extinction helped frame the rapid and violent dispossession of colonized peoples. This cannot be fully appreciated without writing histories about the entangled fates of humans, animals, and plants as new ideas about species loss emerged.

We craft many narratives to make sense of, and wrest meaning from, extinction, yet far too many histories remain untold, forgotten, or erased. Epics in which heroic scientists discover lost species and formulate new theories about their extinction are the most obvious, and common, ways of tracing scientific debates about extinction. In these tales, heroes rooted in entrenched privilege, whether in terms of class, wealth, gender, or race, prevail against the odds to introduce new ideas and change how we view the world. Unfortunately, sweeping accounts of ideas about extinction often fail to recognize women and colonized peoples as producers of meaningful knowledge about the world. In these surveys, marginalized peoples are merely onlookers as history unfolds around them, even as it envelops and destroys their world. This suggests a rather narrow understanding of extinction as a biological process discovered almost exclusively by male scientists, and the nature of history as tales of individualized heroic discovery. Alternatively, we might encounter tragedies in which we lose Edenic bliss and bounty through the sin of earthly over­exploitation that is not slowing even in the gaping maw of an apocalyptic future. Rarity and pre­emptive mourning can also prompt quixotic pilgrimages by intrepid explorers seeking to see the last of their kind. Some extinctions are rendered into exquisite miniatures of endlings, or the last living member of their species, creating a canonical roll­call including Martha the Passenger Pigeon (1914) and Benjamin the Thylacine (1936).17 While captivating, these perspectives can often lead to histories of climate change, conservation movements, and species loss

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privileging iconic animals or spectacular wildernesses. However, we need much richer accounts of how ideas of extinction developed, and not just as stories about species and sites we find enchanting, from pandas to national parks.

Vanished traces how naturalists reimagined extinction from acts of wanton human destruction into a scientific idea born of revolution, and the chilling choices facing us today. By exploring concepts of human and ecological loss together, the book provides a broad exploration of how we understand, and make meaning from, extinction. Instead of a sweeping epic, this book is divided into two parts, with each chapter offering kaleidoscopic glimpses of how extinction has been imagined through examples of animals, peoples, and plants over the past three centuries. Part One addresses the challenge of ‘Peopling Extinction’. We begin by tracing how eighteenth­century naturalists changed their minds about the nature of extinction. Once regarded as a theologically suspect idea, modern naturalists established the notion of extinction as a providential natural law that governed all life. We continue by exploring how ideas about animal extinction were extended to colonized peoples – from North America to Australia and ancient humans –  during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only by peopling histories of extinction can we fully appreciate how the political processes of colonization, conquest, and extermination were routinely conflated, and recast, as the natural extinction of ‘doomed races’. As such, Part One reveals the deep­rooted associations between extinction, empire, genocide, dispossession, and conservation strategies such as the establishment of natural parks, or present­day campaigns for Indigenous land rights. Readers are warned that retracing such connections includes accounts of horrific violence and violations targeting Indigenous peoples, and uses names of the deceased. Part Two explores the making of ‘Empire’s Endlings’. Between the later nineteenth century and mid­twentieth century, concerns about ‘dying races’ were joined, and ultimately eclipsed, by concerns about vanishing species. When extinction was first accepted as a pervasive feature of life on earth in the nineteenth century, naturalists tended to think

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about species loss as historical. When species were eradicated in the modern world, from Steller’s sea cow to the great auk, naturalists reimagined extinction as a process creating, and threatening, vanishing species. Part Two traces how ideas about endangerment led to the founding of new international networks of wildlife protection to conserve, and monitor, threatened species, just as ideas about catastrophic mass extinction were established during the Cold War. We end by exploring possibilities for renewal, redress, and restitution, from the chance finding of a tree believed to be extinct, to the challenges of de­extinction, and, finally, the ability of living beings, such as whales, to recover from the brink of annihilation –  leaving us with glimmers of hope.

By weaving together histories of science, race, and empire, Vanished traces the nature of extinction as a scientific idea, imperial legacy, and political choice. By providing a more compelling account of these past entanglements, this book seeks more worthwhile futures for life on earth. Some ways of being died out long before we existed, but the way we have imagined prehistoric and more recent losses is an unnatural history of our own making that requires fresh historical scrutiny. Extinction may be natural, but it is also a human idea that we use to make meaning from loss in a world that we might be on the verge of destroying – or saving. The choice is ours.

PART ONE

Peopling Extinction

Exit, Pursued by a Mastodon

In spring 1767 the physician William Hunter took a break from ministering to Queen Charlotte, whose husband was George III , and visited the Tower of London. Although the site hosted a menagerie and temporary exhibitions, he travelled there to see the remains of the dead. The Tower had recently acquired the bones, tusks, and teeth of a mysterious beast from North America. Excavators initially believed the fragments were curious minerals moulded in the floodplains, valleys, and flats of a salt lick nicknamed Big Bone Lick, in what is now the state of Kentucky. Over many centuries, animals had visited the site to lick salt, often churning up large bones known to the Shawnee as the father of cattle.1 As larger fragments accumulated from 1739 onwards, European colonists also recognized them as animal remains, but probably those of a gargantuan monster. Naturalists and fossil connoisseurs disputed the nature of the beast, quickly named the ‘Ohio Animal’ after the Ohio river. Amid the excitement about a potentially unknown creature, disputes raged about the meaning of the remains. The tusks convinced many it must be elephantine. Imagine an American elephant when only African and Asian varieties were known! Yet, how did the beast reach the Americas? Where had it lived? And, more controversially, was the beast lost for ever? His curiosity piqued, Dr Hunter met a curator who told him about the fossils’ provenance. When Hunter requested an opportunity to examine the relics, the curator obliged by sending him a tusk and teeth for his extended perusal. After an extensive examination, Hunter sought a second opinion. A kinship with elephants seemed obvious at first sight, but he felt the bones were so large that they must have belonged to a more cumbersome creature.

He considered that they might be from a mammoth whose frozen remains were regularly dug up in the Siberian tundra, but this possibility seemed far­fetched as Hunter noted many ‘modern philosophers have held the mammoth to be as fabulous as the Centaur’.2 Given the mystery over whether mammoths even existed, William Hunter showed the bones to his younger brother John Hunter, also a medical man whose anatomical collections eventually formed the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. William tracked down further specimens by visiting collectors with a penchant for the curious, and compared fragments of the Ohio Animal to the teeth and jaws of ‘elephants, and hippopotami, and other large animals’. He grew convinced the beast was a gargantuan and carnivorous ‘animal incognitum ’.3

William Hunter’s interest was not limited to naming the unknown. He speculated that the fossils might yield clues to the ‘astonishing change’ that must have swept the globe causing ‘the highest mountains’ to have ‘lain for many ages in the bottom of the sea’ while colder climates must have been home to animals now ‘confined to the warm climates’.4 His excited imagination suggests the mystery of the beast’s origins and whereabouts was never merely an issue of classification, but the tantalizing prospect of addressing much bolder questions about earth’s past travails. William’s researches led him to conclude that the beast was a Siberian mammoth. He presented a paper to the Royal Society the following year where he informed his peers ‘we may as philosophers regret it’ but ‘as men we cannot but thank Heaven that its whole generation is probably extinct’.5 Hunter’s gratitude might seem as odd as his conclusion seems obvious to us. However, both reveal a great deal about the history of ideas about extinction. Mourning loss was not inevitable, while even the most cautious claims about annihilation were bold interventions in broader discussions about the very possibility, and nature, of extinction that remained deeply controversial for decades.

The mystery criss­crossed the Atlantic. In Paris the greatest naturalist of the age, Comte de Buffon, insisted the beast was a type of elephant, but one probably lost for ever. Founding Father, enslaver,

Pursued by a Mastodon

and future President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson speculated in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) that the incognitum might live in lands untrodden by colonists. A keen naturalist and fossil collector, he started writing his notes in 1781 to contradict European claims that America’s fauna was weak and inferior to that of the old world. He observed ‘it is well known that on the Ohio, and in many parts of America further north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled magnitude are found in great numbers, some lying on the surface of the earth, and some a little below it’. Drawing on Native knowledge, he insisted that the bones belonged to an animal ‘still existing in the northern parts of their country’.6 As colonization continued westwards from the first thirteen colonies on the east coast of North America, much of the continent remained well known only by Native nations. Jefferson believed it eminently possible that they knew of a living incognitum in their lands. His speculation indicates a broader reluctance to assume apparently absent creatures were extinct, and the difficulty of knowing if they were, even when relying on established Native knowledge stretching further back than any European presence on the continent.

Naturalists knew that declaring the beast extinct required judicious caution. In this period, species were usually regarded as stable, unchanging, natural kinds created by God. The notion they might change, let alone develop or vanish, was considered implausible and possibly even atheistic. Lost natural kinds were Creation’s lacunae. If a species was suspiciously absent, three possibilities appeared logically possible in the eighteenth century. First, the species might have migrated and simply remained unknown in new territory. Second, the species might have developed into another, or evolved in modern terms, and survived in an apparently unconnected form, but this was difficult to defend against a broader consensus about the fixity of species. Third, the species had vanished. Extinction was a known possibility, but generally attributed to wanton human destruction. From the three options of migration, development, and extinction, naturalists usually favoured migration. Accepting extinction as a process inherent to life on earth contradicted the

belief that God’s Creation always exhibited its full range of perfection and diversity, or the principle of plenitude. Regarding natural imperfection as an inherent feature posed significant scientific and theological dangers.7 William Hunter’s cautious description of the incognitum as ‘probably extinct’ was an important recognition of the claim’s gravity. Soon, a political revolution transformed the reticence of naturalists.

Eden’s Relics

Parisian revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress holding just seven quickly liberated prisoners, on 14 July 1789. The overthrow of the old regime ushered in political upheavals credited with the birth of the modern nation and modern sciences. The French Revolution abolished many forms of feudal and aristocratic privilege in an effort to replace the ancient ties of royal subjecthood with the promise of equal citizenship in a new nation.8 French science already thrived in institutions such as the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Paris Observatory, both founded in the 1660s, but revolution dismantled older hierarchies to found new educational and vocational structures. The royal academies were abolished in 1793 and replaced by the Institut National, dedicated to the three classes of science, moral and political sciences, and literature and art, in 1795. The scientific class was renamed the Académie des Sciences in 1815. The foundation of specialized elite training schools later known as the grandes écoles, most notably the École Polytechnique founded in 1794, and new positions in reformed and revolutionary institutions, meant revolutionary upheaval had created fortunate new prospects for ambitious men.9

Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France in 1799, a decade after revolution erupted, moved into the Tuileries Palace in 1800, and crowned himself Emperor in December 1804. Napoleon’s early ambitions were evident in his campaign to colonize the ancient kingdom of Egypt; while unsuccessful, he and his men returned with

Pursued by a Mastodon

an extraordinary assortment of manuscripts and artefacts collected between 1798 and 1801. Among these, the Rosetta Stone helped scholars decode Egyptian hieroglyphs and, after its seizure by the British, was displayed in the British Museum where it remains. Once home, Napoleon refashioned Paris into an imperial capital with the classical grandeur of ancient Athens or Rome. He commissioned monuments commemorating his military victories, including the Vendôme Column and the Arc de Triomphe. Napoleon’s acquisitiveness included the territories of his foes and collections of European elites. Waging near ceaseless war across Europe, he extended France’s imperial reach as far as the Kingdom of Prussia along the northern European coast, the Confederacy of the Rhine in central Europe, and into central Italy bordering the Kingdom of Naples. After Napoleon’s defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, his success faded and he left France with less territory than when he seized power. However, his exploits permanently swelled with their seized loot the already vast holdings of Parisian museums.10

As revolution gripped Paris, the future of the royal garden, the Jardin du Roi, seemed as inauspicious as that of other institutions of the old order. Founded by the royal decree of Louis XIII in May 1635, the royal garden was originally planted as a medicinal herb garden. The site eventually housed the King’s personal museum (Cabinet du Roi ) and menagerie from 1794.11 In the eighteenth century, the royal garden’s intellectual and social fortunes were transformed under the leadership of Georges­Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Severing the garden from its medicinal roots, he created an important site for botanical research, such as acclimatizing foreign plants sent back to Paris as seeds or living flora by a global network of collectors and correspondents. His stellar reputation rested upon his monumental and encyclopaedic Natural History (Histoire Naturelle ). Lauded as a masterpiece across Europe, this astonishing work comprised thirty­six volumes published during his lifetime, but ultimately sprawled across forty­four volumes published between 1749 and 1804. The magnum opus was posthumously finished by Buffon’s protégé, the Comte de Lacépède, who was specifically trained for the task by the elderly

author.12 Buffon presided over the royal garden between 1739 and his death in 1788, a year before the outbreak of revolutionary violence. When the royal garden’s naturalists were summoned before the Revolutionary Assembly they pleaded for a chance to reform. Reprieved, they spent an anxious summer developing a proposal to transform themselves from royally patronized subjects to stateemployed professors administering an amalgamated royal botanic garden, menagerie and museum of natural history. In June 1793 revolutionaries abolished the royal garden and rebranded the site a botanic garden (Jardin des plantes ), while also founding the new Museum of Natural History (Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle ) alongside twelve professorships. Within weeks, revolutionaries also established an arts museum ( Musée des Arts ) as a state ­ owned art collection at the Louvre Palace, and the botanic garden was opened to the public the following spring. Amid the political fervour, the professors saved their necks by rebranding their expertise in taming nature as perfectly suited to improving a nation sullied by the worst excesses of the ancien régime. 13 In a wonderful history of the garden, the historian

1.1 Jardin des plantes.

Pursued by a Mastodon

Emma Spary suggests that the naturalists tried to create an utopia through nurturing the grounds, and by extension, France into a wellordered, economically productive garden at the heart of the French Empire.14 Originally on the outskirts of the city, but eventually enveloped by urban sprawl, the garden was a prominent site for botanical study, innocent walks, and clandestine trysts (Fig. 1.1). The combined effect of revolutionary violence, imperial ambition, and institutional reforms created unrivalled new opportunities to make natural knowledge while gaining power and prestige during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

One of the most important careers forged in the wake of these changes was that of a young man interested in geology, anatomy, and natural history. Georges Cuvier made his name as a comparative anatomist whose research transformed the understanding of earth’s history and the nature of extinction. Born in 1769, he grew up in the French­speaking principality of Montbéliard, then under the control of the Duke of Württemberg. Cuvier’s parents hoped he might become a Lutheran minister, but he proved to be a gifted naturalist, reading his uncle’s copy of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle at just twelve years old. After completing his education at Caroline University in 1788 he was unable to secure a position in local government. He moved to Normandy and spent six years working as a private tutor while continuing his research in natural history. Cuvier became a French citizen when Montbéliard was subsumed within French territory in 1793. Witnessing revolution erupt from the relative quiet of rural France, he wrote to established professors at the Museum of Natural History seeking new opportunities. He was encouraged to come to Paris by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint­Hilaire, who was appointed to a professorship at the museum in his early twenties.

Cuvier ventured to Paris hoping to benefit from the dismantling of old patronage networks just after the worst extremes of the Terror in 1795. Amid political disarray, Cuvier was serendipitously recruited to assist an elderly professor of animal anatomy at the new museum. He lived and worked on­site alongside many museum

employees and their families. Although appointed as an anatomist, he broadened his research to comparative anatomy, furthered his reputation through public lectures, and achieved a full professorship within seven years. Cuvier believed species were fixed natural kinds that could not change –  or evolve in modern terms. He classified life into four main types, or embranchements, and privileged inward function over outward form when classifying species. In contrast, his colleague Geoffroy Saint­Hilaire theorized that vertebrates were all based on a single archetypical plan, with higher vertebrates, such as mammals, having descended from simpler forms, such as fish, implying some form of developmental change.15 Their disagreement over species fixity created a lasting rivalry.

Even as a junior employee, Cuvier’s ideas about species and research on fossils proved important. In the pre­modern world any oddly shaped stone might be called a fossil, from the Latin fossilis for something dug up from the land. Scholars debated whether fossils were animal, vegetable, or mineral until the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, fossilized remnants of marine­dwelling ammonites were considered unlike anything known, but many authorities argued they might be found alive in unexplored territories. As larger beasts were dug up from Siberia to the Americas, naturalists cautiously debated their whereabouts. Cuvier investigated the mystery of apparently vanished beings soon after arriving in Paris, beginning with elephants. Most of his peers regarded Asian and African elephants as the same species. Cuvier suspected otherwise. After the French defeat of the Dutch during the revolutionary wars, the Treaty of the Hague in 1795 committed the removal of Dutch heritage collections to Paris, including important natural history specimens such as elephant skulls from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and from the Cape of Good Hope along the South Atlantic coast of southern Africa. Cuvier compared these skulls to a Siberian mammoth’s jawbone already in Paris. He presented his findings to colleagues and published a paper on the creatures in 1796. Cuvier already thought the trio were different species, but the Dutch collections allowed him to ‘turn the suspicions into certainty’. Cuvier

Exit, Pursued by a Mastodon insisted even untrained eyes could discern they were not the same species, but he felt their teeth were especially telling. The Asian elephant’s teeth were ‘festooned with ribbons’, while the African elephant’s teeth were ‘diamond forms’. He argued the differences were greater ‘than the horse from the ass or the goat from the sheep’, making the elephants different species.16

Cuvier turned his attention to the mammoth. He reminded his readers that mammoths were frequently dug up ‘underground in Siberia, Germany, France, Canada, and even Peru’, but rejected every explanation for their continued existence. He was unconvinced by local reports that the mammoth was a subterranean beast that resisted capture. Other fossil megafauna appeared ill suited to present­day climates because they were so unlike surviving fauna. If mammoths were lost, Cuvier wondered, what misfortune caused their demise? He considered the three possibilities that naturalists usually entertained when pondering apparent loss: migration, development, and extinction. He was sceptical that such gargantuan animals might roam the earth undiscovered. They were simply too big to survive unnoticed by people even after migrating to pastures new. He was adamant that the mammoth had not developed into another species because he regarded species as unchanging natural kinds. In guarded words, Cuvier proposed that the collection and consideration of ‘all these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to prove to me the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe’.17

A few months later in 1796, Cuvier pondered the strange, and unusually complete, skeleton of the ‘Paraguay animal’. Originally revealed a hundred feet below surface rocks near Buenos Aires, then Spanish South America, in 1789 the remains were shipped to Madrid. Juan­Bautista Bru worked at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History of Madrid as a dissector in the royal laboratory. He mounted the bones to conjure a colossal beast twelve feet long and six feet high with broad shoulders, thick thighs, flat feet, and large pointed claws. Bru commissioned engravings of his magnificent prize specimen for future publication. Those images piqued the curiosity of a visiting French

official who acquired unpublished proofs and hastily dispatched copies to Paris in 1796. Cuvier pored over the images of individual bones and the mounted skeleton. Not one bone resembled any living animal of similar size while the skull, shoulder blades, pelvis, and pointed claws were utterly peculiar. Cuvier named the beast the Megatherium americanum in a paper published in 1798 (Fig. 1.2). He conceded the megatherium’s claws and teeth resembled edentates such as sloths, armadillos, pangolins, anteaters and the aardvark, but concluded it must be another long­lost beast, perhaps a gigantic sloth. His paper confidently asserted ‘this animal differs, in the ensemble of its characters, from all known animals’. This fact ‘adds to the numerous facts that tell us that the animals of the ancient world all differ from those we see on earth today’.18

Spurred on by the mammoth and megatherium, Cuvier formulated a new principle of comparative anatomy and made it the cornerstone of his ongoing researches into extinction and earth’s history. He hypothesized that if an anatomist found a sharp­toothed jawbone of a carnivore, he could be assured the animal’s entire skeleton would enable the rapid and successful hunting of prey and a stomach able to digest meat. On this basis, he believed skilled anatomists could reconstruct whole creatures from fragments because skeletal and visceral forms were interdependent and perfectly suited to the conditions of a creature’s existence. Without naming himself and with characteristic bravado, Cuvier elevated his theory about the correlation of parts to the heady levels of disciplinary superiority: ‘comparative anatomy has reached such a point of perfection that, after inspecting a single bone, one can often determine the class, and sometimes even the genus of the animal to which it belonged, and above all if the bone belonged to the head of the limbs’.19 Cuvier’s specific claim was about classifying animals, but his devotees insisted that Cuvier’s principle allowed him, and his disciples, to summon forth an entire animal from a single bone. The exaggerated claim was repeated in the European and American press for more than a century, elevating the originally pragmatic principle into the natural law of the ‘correlation of forms’, assuring his subsequent fame.20

1.2 Megatherium, Natural History Museum, London.

Cuvier’s ideas benefited from the rapid expansion of Paris. As the city’s population swelled and new buildings and monuments mushroomed, miners routinely dug up unknown creatures while quarrying for gypsum to mix plaster of Paris, or Lutetian limestone, the distinctive Paris Stone, to render the outside of buildings. Found embedded deep within the stone layers, mysterious forms were routinely sent to the Museum of Natural History. Cuvier wondered: What were they? Why were they deposited so deeply within the strata? What did they reveal about life on earth? Slowly, he interpreted them as ‘antiquities of nature’, allowing naturalists to disentangle earth’s history as effectively as ‘ordinary antiquities provide for the political and moral history of nations’.21 Increasingly convinced that extinct animals perished in a cataclysm affecting a prehuman world, Cuvier compiled a list of extinct species described by himself or other geologists. The twenty­three species included the North American mastodon that baffled so many, Siberian mammoth, megatherium, long­headed rhinoceros, a large German cave bear, a hyena, giant ‘Elk’ from Irish bogs, fossil turtles, the lizardlike Maastricht crocodile (later named the Mosasaurus ), a winged Bavarian reptile (which he later named the ptero-dactyle or ‘wingfingered animal’), two species of extinct tapir later, and an extinct hippopotamus.22 Many of these species, such as the crocodile or winged dragon, were widely known geological curiosities when Cuvier compiled his list, but he was confident that they were unlike any living species and so helped to reinterpret their significance. Within a decade, Cuvier used his list to predict that extinct beasts might be found beneath the surface of all nations.

Cuvier was especially intrigued by Parisian fossils that resembled living creatures in far­flung places, such as South American tapirs or Australian marsupials. In 1804 the Parisian gypsum yielded a split rock emblazoned with a tiny skeleton including a visible jaw, ribs, spine, pelvis, and legs. Cuvier suspected it was a marsupial. If true, the remarkable specimen conjured a lost world populated with animals unlike anything surviving in France and known only from New Holland (modern Australia). Imagine, tiny marsupials grazing

Exit, Pursued by a Mastodon alongside tapirs in what is now Paris, and rhinos where the Louvre now stands! If the fossil was a marsupial, Cuvier predicted two long, flat bones originally supporting a marsupial pouch were hidden in the pelvis. Typically self­assured, he invited colleagues to watch him chip away at the precious fossil. He carved away the gypsum with delicate strokes, brushed off the debris and, to his satiated delight, found the marsupial bones. As he later noted, such fossils proved the city’s plaster quarries were studded with the ‘remains of animals that can only be of a genus now confined entirely to America, or else of another confined entirely to New Holland’.23

Finding a European marsupial radically shifted scientific thought about the history of the earth, by suggesting an ancient, extinct world in which Europe was home to creatures known only from the Americas or antipodes. Still unique, Cuvier’s specimen is so rare that it is kept in secure storage at the museum where he worked. The historian of geology Martin Rudwick suggests the flamboyant demonstration was an attempt to vindicate the predictive powers of comparative anatomy and to argue that it was as scientifically reliable as chemistry or Newtonian mathematics. This was not mere bravado, but a carefully choreographed attempt to establish Cuvier’s reputation as the world’s foremost authority on fossils and exciting new anatomy that, in turn, was crucial for new ideas about extinction.24 Cuvier’s research can easily be retold as a tale of genius and discovery, but this would misrepresent the broader context in which his research was conducted. In many senses he was a gifted man in the right place at the right time. His unrivalled access to specimens, his position in a stellar research institution, and careful detailed comparisons between fossils and bones all helped to make his claims about extinction and earth’s history significantly more compelling than they might have been without such professional and political advantages.

Educated men in world­class institutions are easily acknowledged as makers of new scientific knowledge, but public exhibitions were just as important for circulating and creating knowledge about extinction. The American incognitum was exhibited in America and toured Europe amid continued speculation about its origin and nature (Fig. 1.3).

The American painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale exhibited the skeleton of an American incognitum at his eponymous museum in Philadelphia. The bones were dug up in Orange County, New York, and heaped in a granary until Peale bought them from the landowner for $200 in 1801. Struck by their commercial potential, Peale secured permission for further excavations and eventually acquired three skeletons. Peale’s fabulously named sons, Rembrandt and Rubens, took the second of their father’s prized skeletons on tour the following year. Rembrandt wrote an illustrated pamphlet that advertised the ‘Great American Incognitum, An Extinct, Immense, Carnivorous Animal’, and explicitly used Cuvier’s research to promote the beast as a newly discovered scientific marvel. The pamphlet included extensive discussions of the beast’s anatomy, the latest scientific literature about life on earth, and legends. These included Shawnee knowledge about a great and ancient destruction, and a rabbi’s belief that the mammoth was the Behemoth of the Book of Job and would provide a ‘feast for the Jews on their restoration’.25 Given the incognitum’s close resemblance to remains dug up in Siberia and across Britain, Rembrandt advertised the beast as a mammoth and even speculated that Siberia and America

1.3 Skeleton of the Missouri Leviathan, or American Incognitum.

Exit, Pursued by a Mastodon were once in ‘communication, or that a deluge’ deposited the remains in America following the species’ disappearance.26

Exhibitions, impresarios, and promotional pamphlets may seem peripheral or irrelevant to developing notions of extinction, but they were important in multiple ways. Scholars keen to see the first almost complete reconstruction of an extinct animal exhibited in Britain took advantage of Peale’s show for their investigations and wrote scientific papers on the beast. Modern scientific research often occurs in specialist spaces such as laboratories, but natural knowledge was historically made in a much more varied range of venues we might never associate with scientific practice, from royal courts, pubs, and coffee houses, to public exhibitions.27 Rembrandt Peale’s pamphlet made Cuvier’s theories about extinction and geological catastrophes accessible far beyond the scientific elite. This introduced Cuvier to a much larger audience, including people with considerable scientific expertise who excerpted the writings for learned publications across Europe. Some of the show’s patrons might have known about the incognitum or new research on extinction beforehand, but many first encountered fossil reconstructions through such exhibitions, as we still do by visiting museums. Rembrandt was keenly aware of the value of personal observations of his exhibit: ‘Much has been said on the subject of bones found in America by persons who never saw them, but mutilated fragments of them; resting their faith upon what has been said by certain writers of science and respectability . . . and then falling into the error.’28 These polemical claims were an assertion of authority and an attempt to secure paying custom, but he was not alone, or wrong, in considering the exhibition an important contribution to debates about extinction. Public exhibitions and their accompanying literatures were integral to generating, and circulating, new knowledge about extinction.29 Rembrandt also left another legacy. He commissioned engravings of the specimen. Copies were sent to Paris where Cuvier worried over them as he revisited his original musings on elephants and catastrophic species loss.

A decade after Cuvier’s first investigations into living elephants and

their fossilized counterparts, he ruminated at length on the elephantine ‘Ohio animal’ that so intrigued Hunter, Jefferson, and Buffon. Cuvier was already familiar with elephants, rhinos, tapirs, and the hippos. Vague similarities to elephants aside, on closer inspection Cuvier determined the animal was an extinct species distinct from elephants and mammoths, and named it the Mastodon or ‘breasttooth’ to signify the plump mounds sitting above the molars. These helped the beast crush food, unlike the flatter, ribbon­like teeth used for grinding in elephants and mammoths.30 With a decade’s experience of examining fossilized animals and a rapidly growing list of lost species, Cuvier speculated freely about their passing: ‘before this catastrophe these animals lived in the [same] climate where their bones are now unearthed. It is this catastrophe that destroyed them there; and since they are no longer found elsewhere, it must indeed have annihilated the species.’31 Crucially, he believed that the extinct creatures were dug up where they died, rather than far from where they might have been washed away by an ancient deluge, whether Biblical or not. Rather, these beasts were stricken by a mysterious and more sudden calamity, such as climate change.

Cuvier was not the first to suggest animal extinction occurred, so it would be unwise to romanticize him as a lone genius fighting tides of ignorance. However, his careful comparisons between fossilized beasts and living animals, spanning over a decade and covering a multitude of species, yielded so much plausible evidence that megafauna such as the mammoth, mastodon, and megatherium were extinct that even cautious naturalists grew increasingly convinced. Cuvier gathered his papers on fossilized bones and extinct beasts, wrote a new introduction to the collection, and arranged for them to be published in the lavish four­volume Researches on Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds (Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes ) in 1812, later superseded by a second edition in seven volumes (1821–4). The work was introduced with a lengthy, and widely distributed ‘Preliminary Discourse’ (Discours préliminaire ), which boldly asserted that many calamities caused past extinctions. Although many naturalists across the Channel read Cuvier’s work

Pursued by a Mastodon in French, periodical discussions helped circulate his ideas to a much broader audience and popularized the notion of extinction.32 Likewise, exhibitions, promotional pamphlets, and reports of his ideas were among the most accessible discussions for anyone beyond the scientific elite. Cuvier’s widely circulated research on ancient reptiles and mammals helped confirm that living fauna were radically unlike their predecessors and that an age of reptiles preceded an age of mammals. His investigations were swiftly regarded as irrefutable proof that extinction was not only possible, but an inherent process in life’s development. In a decade characterized by revolutionary political violence and European warfare, Cuvier patiently and confidently built his scientific empire through reconstructing lost ancient worlds. Cuvier’s collected works were a ‘paper museum of fossil bones’ reprinted and circulated in transnational networks, while visitors to the Museum of Natural History in Paris might personally inspect his menagerie of skeletons.33 His new galleries of comparative anatomy were opened to the public in 1806, the same year he named the American incognitum the mastodon. Situated in a building away from the historic central galleries, Cuvier’s displays were a microcosm of his ideas about the fixity of species and classification of life into four main types, or embranchements. Stretching over several floors, the galleries showcased his research as the most authoritative explanation of nature’s order, much to the chagrin of his dissenting colleagues. Curiously, the extinct beasts so foundational for Cuvier’s reputation were either displayed and stored in his private apartments, or in the older, central galleries. A later guidebook to the museum explicitly noted the plethora of extinct species named and reconstructed by the great Monsieur: ‘The fossil bones of quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles occupy the twelve glazed cases opposite the windows . . . [they] are arranged according to the order adopted by M. Cuvier in his great work on fossil remains, which contains a description and figure of almost every specimen in this collection.’34 While the galleries promoted Cuvierian theories of anatomy and taxonomy, the entire site teemed with extinct beasts that affirmed his personal eminence, and the Parisian collections, for understanding extinction.35

Cuvier’s position within European scientific networks was remarkably significant during his lifetime, but his reputation faded after his death in 1832. His geological research helped establish earth as a subject of historical study, challenging theorists who framed the planet as an abstract timeless world without beginning or end. As evolutionary understandings of life gained ground in the midnineteenth century, his steadfast belief in unchanging species meant he fell out of favour with both biologists and historians who caricatured him as on the losing side of the evolutionary debate. His legacy was only revived in the later twentieth century when historians of science used his writings to understand broader themes such as the development of the earth sciences, or the emergence of modern scientific institutions within revolutionary Paris.36

Extinction Unbound

In the early nineteenth century, lists of extinct beasts were compiled, lost landscapes recreated, and stellar reputations forged as people imagined and debated the nature of a world before a Biblical flood. Artefacts we consider fossilized remnants of extinct flora and fauna have been encountered by humans for millennia. While ancient peoples used fragments of dinosaur eggs to make jewellery, Native nations were familiar with the large beasts of Big Bone Lick and incorporated them into accounts about the origin of bison long before Europeans worried about the incognitum.37 These fascinating insights help us trace when petrified beings were first encountered, but we must remember that their finders often invested them with very different meanings. Interpreting these remains as extinct species inhabiting lost worlds only gathered pace in the nineteenth century. The radical surgeon James Parkinson’s research on ‘shaking palsy’ led to the naming of Parkinson’s disease. As a keen geologist, he helped found the Geological Society of London in 1807, the world’s first national society devoted to the emerging discipline. His beautifully illustrated book Organic Remains of a Former World (1804–11) framed

Exit, Pursued by a Mastodon

fossils as the ‘medals of creation’, revealing that ‘innumerable beings have lived, of which not one of the same kind does any longer exist’. Their sheer abundance must ‘excite the highest admiration’. The physician and renowned naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton passionately advocated for the ubiquity of extinction in 1814 when he wrote a book about extinct animals, boldly stating:

I speak of those animals as extinct. In doing this, I adopt the language of the first naturalists of the age. No naturalist, no philosopher; no one tolerably acquainted with the history of nature’s works and operations, will subscribe to the puerile opinion, that Nature does not permit any of her species of animals, or vegetables, to perish.38

Barton’s affirmation of the latest natural historical research suggests just how quickly older suspicions about extinction turned into confident assertions.

New understandings of extinction were quickly integrated into Christian theology. Parkinson imagined extinction as a process for ‘forming, destroying and reforming the earth’, and the perfection of Creation culminating in humans.39 His discussion of extinction as a cumulative process of development shows how easily new ideas about ubiquitous and recurrent processes of extinction might be incorporated into narratives of developmental progress driven by God’s laws. Others drew upon Cuvier’s research to reconcile, and recalibrate, new ideas about earth’s past with Biblical accounts of Creation.40 The Reverend William Buckland was appointed the University of Oxford’s first Reader in Geology from 1819. He felt Cuvier’s catastrophic deluge was easily read as dividing earth’s history into an antediluvian age abounding with ancient, fearsome beasts and a postdiluvian world in which Noah’s family and animals migrated over the earth to re­establish divinely created abundance. Expectations of conflict between science and religion are often rooted in assumptions that they are separate, incompatible, intellectual endeavours, but this is a modern distinction that makes it difficult to appreciate how past practitioners regarded their faith and scientific research as

mutually intelligible. Over the early nineteenth century, many geologists adapted their understanding of Creation as a series of events giving rise to the highest forms of life, and extinction as a God­given law directing, and shaping, a gradual progression to ever more superior beings.41

As geologists gained a foothold in elite clubs, new societies, and universities, their ideas about extinction colonized new academic and theological terrain. Reverend Buckland’s flamboyant lectures drew crowds of students who learned of strange, extinct beings as they handled depictions of vanished worlds, including a large illustration of Peale’s mammoth, paintings of ancient landscapes, and spectacular fossils of ammonites and ichthyosaurs (Fig. 1.4).

Buckland also secured fame through his research on extinct British hyenas. In 1821 he visited Kirkdale Cave in North Yorkshire. Geologists knew the site was studded with a pell­mell assortment

1.4 Scholars attending a lecture by Buckland in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Exit, Pursued by a Mastodon of well­preserved bones from hyenas, elephants, and hippos alongside their ordure. To great acclaim, Buckland vividly reconstructed the hyenas’ diet and antediluvian den, making him the first to place an extinct species within the place it once lived, rather than where it perished or was preserved.42 While Kirkdale Cave teemed with familiar beasts, geologists grappled with accruing revelations about unknown monsters.

The classification of newly unearthed species as extinct kinds created a brisk market for specimens, with some of the most exquisite found by a keen­eyed young girl. The carpenter Richard Anning lived in Lyme Regis in west Dorset, an area well­known for its petrified monsters. He supplemented his income by combing the local beaches for fossils to sell to wealthy collectors. After his death, his wife Mary Anning and their children, Mary and Joseph, became expert fossil hunters in their own right. In 1811 fifteen­year­old Joseph found a peculiar skull, while twelve­year­old Mary found the rest of the skeleton a year later. After its sale to a local collector and an exhibition in London, the specimen caught the attention of many prominent geologists, and was eventually named Ichthyosaurus (‘fish lizard’) in 1817. The young Mary also found a nearly complete skeleton of another lizard­like reptile in 1823, later named Plesiosaurus (‘almost lizard’) by the geologists William D. Conybeare and Henry De La Beche (Fig. 1.5). Unfortunately, the Anning family’s precarious finances made selling the treasures an urgent necessity, and for many years Mary’s finds were attributed solely to the gentlemen who could afford to buy, keep, display, or donate them, and whose Latin names for the species were suitably accredited by the scientific elite. Mary Anning’s fossils ended up in prestigious collections such as the British Museum and Natural History Museum in London, and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, her personal contribution was largely relegated to children’s rhymes about the girl who sold seashells by the seashore or was erased from academic histories of geology despite buyers’ private letters referring to her as the curious ‘geological Lioness’ or ‘Princess of palaeontology’.43 In 2021, following a renaissance of

1.5 Mary Anning’s autograph letter concerning the discovery of plesiosaurus.