Chapter 2: The Mastodons Molars

July 14, 2019

   

          The Second chapter starts out with Kolbert, using her kids as an example, to point out the obvious: humans have come a long way acquiring hard to obtain knowledge up until now that in today's world people can just learn the concept of extinction with ease. However,  back then the extinction was relatively a new concept which many people such as the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, failed to establish. According to page 23, "Pliny's Natural History includes descriptions of animals that are real and descriptions of animals that are fabulous, but no descriptions of animals that are extinct", but extinction slowly came to be a concept when bones of the American Mastodon were discovered. At first, naturalists were unable to identify the species to whom the bones belonged to, and they would make conclusions such as the bones coming from 3 different species. Yet, when Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist, decided to do research on not only these bones but bones discovered elsewhere and came to the striking hypothesis that the bones belonged to a large family of species (Mammoth, Mastodon, Elephant, etc.). This extensive amount of research Cuvier to acknowledge quoted in page 30, "All these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours...But what was this primitive earth? And what revolution was able to wipe out?". The idea of extinction has been well established by this point, however, Cuvier's evidence including his list of extinct species and his theory made the concept of extinction to be recognized by other naturalists in the world. This connects to the APES Theme: Science is a process that constantly changes the way we understand the world. Cuvier came to a conclusion found on page 44, " The changes that had caused extinction must, therefore, have been of a much greater magnitude--- so great that animals had been unable to cope with them. [R] Although the chapter is telling us about the history of species and Cuvier's research, we can see how science and how we understand it evolves not just to naturalists but to everyone in the present day.