Lake Annecy Story

Chapter Six

Nature was created, and can only be destroyed, by God 

6.1 ‘When Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature, he made no distinction between the living and the dead, because in his view none was required.  This view persisted despite a sizeable body of evidence to the contrary. Cabinets of curiosities in London, Paris and Berlin were filled with traces of strange creatures that no-one had ever seen – the remains of animals that would now be identified as trilobites, belemnites and ammonites.

6.2 Extinction finally emerged as a concept, in revolutionary France.  It did so largely thanks to one animal, the creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and one man, the naturalist .. Georges Cuvier.

6.3 Cuvier arrived in Paris in early 1795, half a century after remains of the ‘creature without a name’, including a large tooth, had reached the city.  He was 25 years old and had secured a teaching job at Paris’ Museum of Natural History.

6.4 When he examined the tooth he was impressed not just by its size but its shape – it was composed of knobbly protuberances which reminded him of nipples. From his unchallenged knowledge of anatomy he declared that no living species of elephant has such teeth.  Modern elephants’ teeth are more sophisticated, less knobbly and stronger, suitable for a more abrasive diet.  So he declared the creature an entirely new species which had now gone extinct – and in 1806 named it ‘mastodonte’ from the Greek for breast tooth.  He was the  first person to prove the existence of one extinct animal.

6.5 Cuvier set out to find more such examples and the list grew. And grew stranger. The more extinct species Cuvier turned up, the more the nature of the beasts seemed to change. Cave bears, giant sloths, even giant salamanders – all these bore some relationship to species still alive. But what to make of a bizarre fossil that had been found in a limestone formation in Bavaria. Cuvier on the basis of an engraving he saw determined shockingly that the animal was actually a flying reptile. He called it a ptero-dactyl, meaning wing fingered.

6.6 In 1812 Cuvier published a four-volume compendium of his work on fossil animals: "Recherches sur less ossemens fossils de quadrupede." By this time there were 49 proved extinct vertebrate. And as the list grew so did his renown.

6.7 Cuvier’s discovery of extinction – a world previous to ours – was a sensational event. And a difficult fact for many to concede. Why on earth would God have created a world before this, only to let it go extinct?

6.8 The puzzle deepened as the excavations deepened. Lost species whose remains could be found near the surface of the earth, like mastondons and cave bears, belonged to orders of creatures still alive. Dig back further and one found creatures that had no obvious modern counterparts. Keep digging an mammals disappeared altogether from the fossil record. Eventually one reached a world not just previous to ours, but a world previous to that, dominated by giant reptiles.

6.9 If it seemed unfortunate to let one world go extinct then losing two looked like carelessness. Cuvier’s ideas about a globe wracked periodically by cataclysm proved very nearly as influential as his original discoveries. His major essay on the subject published in 1812 was almost immediately reprinted in English and exported to America. Although ultimately proved wrong in many details, some of Cuvier’s most wild-sounding claims have turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Life on earth has been disturbed by terrible events, and organisms without number have been their victims.

6.10 We now know of five completed periods of mass extinctions since the Cambrian explosion of complex animal life around 550 million years ago. The first around 440 million years ago around the time when plants were beginning to cover the land. Then 365, 225 and 210 million years ago before the last and best generally known extinction 65 million years ago when the age of the dinosaurs came to an end, and fortunately for us, the age of mammals began. These five major extinctions, interspersed with other minor extinctions, revealed the living world to be not so powerful after all – in fact looked at in terms of geological time – the living natural world seemed rather vulnerable. When will it happen again?

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