Chapter 2: “The Mastodon’s Molars”

In chapter 2, Kolbert explains that scientists from thousands of years ago didn’t really mention the possibility of extinctions. For example, Carl Linnaeus and Aristotle wrote books about different animals without including information about the ancestry or history of them. The concept of extinction emerged after Georges Cuvier spread his revolutionary theories. Europeans discovered the bones of the American Mastodon and were puzzled. When they found the tooth of a mastodon, they thought that it belonged to a giant. Baron de Longueuil, Charles le Moyne and other Frenchmen were traveling through Ohio and stumbled upon huge bones and other parts of a mastodon and sent them to France. After examining the parts, they were able to connect them to other types of animals, such as elephants but the teeth were peculiar. Because of this, several theories emerged that said that the fossils came from multiple animals. When Cuvier studied the bones, he came to the conclusion that the two elephants came from different species. African elephants are dangerous while Asian elephants are calm. The factor that distinguished them the most was the teeth. From this, he was able to determine that it actually wasn’t an elephant and it was a different species that died off and he called them lost species. 

This chapter connects to the theme, Science is a process. As time progresses and more observations and theories are made, we are able to learn more about the world around us. This is evident with what occurred in this chapter. Many scientists were puzzled by a fossil that was stumbled upon and his led to an explanation for a phenomenon. The book states, “ All these facts, consistent among themselves, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours. Cuvier said. ‘But what was this primitive earth? And what revolution was able to wipe it out?” (30) This demonstrates how through the findings of other scientists, the knowledge of the world was able to progress because people continued to ask questions. The discovery of fossils of the American mastodon motivated Cuvier to continue studying extinctions and he was able to declare extinction a fact.