Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, this chapter, it's kind of a downer, honestly. It starts with this, like, amazing moment, right? Halley and Wren and Hooke, these brilliant minds, just chilling in a coffee shop, making a bet that, believe it or not, leads to Newton's *Principia* and all these incredible scientific breakthroughs. But, at the same time, practically, there's this other thing happening far away in Mauritius.
You've got, presumably, some sailor or, maybe it was a pet they had, who was, like, you know, killing the last dodo bird. And, like, the dodo was just, well, it was basically defenseless. Couldn't fly, kind of dumb, wasn't very fast... easy pickings for bored people hanging out on the beach. Millions of years of isolation, and they were just completely unprepared for human cruelty. It’s almost like they were just so naive, they wouldn’t even run. Supposedly, if you wanted to find them all, you could just grab one and make it squawk, and the rest would come waddling over, curious as all get out.
We don't really know when the last dodo disappeared, which sucks. We can't even say for sure if Newton's book came out before or after they went extinct, which really sucks, but it was around the same time, give or take. And, ugh, it's just so depressing when you think about it. It's, like, one species capable of unlocking the secrets of the universe, and at the same time, wiping out another species, for absolutely no good reason! Just because.
And it doesn't stop there, folks! Like, 70 years after the last dodo died, the freaking curator of the Oxford museum found their dodo specimen was all moldy, and you know what he did? He told someone to just burn it. I mean, seriously? It was, like, the only one they had! Some employee, thankfully, tried to save it, but only managed to get the head and a leg out of the fire.
So, you know, because of that and, well, other stupid decisions, we don’t really even know for sure what a dodo actually looked like. It's, like, all we have are some, as this 19th-century naturalist put it, "scrappy accounts of some unscientific sailors," a few paintings, and some bone fragments. We know more about ancient sea monsters and dinosaurs than we do about a bird that was walking around until relatively recently. A bird that literally asked nothing more than to be left alone.
Basically, all we know is that it lived in Mauritius, was a bit chubby, apparently didn't taste very good, and was the biggest pigeon around. How big? Well, we don't really know that either. Probably about 80 centimeters tall, roughly the same length from beak to butt. They built their nests on the ground, because they couldn't fly, so their eggs and chicks were super easy targets for pigs, dogs, and monkeys that people brought to the island. And they probably disappeared around 1683, maybe completely gone by 1693. That’s all we got. We don't know anything about their breeding habits, what they ate, where they lived, what they sounded like... we don't even have a single dodo egg.
We only shared the planet with living dodos for about 70 years. That's like a blink of an eye, you know? Though, to be fair, we’d already been driving species to extinction for thousands of years at that point. It's hard to really grasp the full extent of the damage, but it's pretty clear that wherever humans go, animals tend to disappear, often in huge numbers.
Think about it. After humans arrived in the Americas, like, 30 kinds of big animals, *really* big animals, just vanished. Like three-quarters of the large animal species in North and South America were wiped out by hunters with flint spears. Even in Europe and Asia, where animals had, you know, evolved to be wary of humans, like, a third to half of the big animals disappeared. And in Australia, where the animals hadn't learned to be afraid of us, something like 95% of the big animals just went poof.
Now, some people argue that there had to be other factors, like climate change or diseases, because, you know, there weren't *that* many early hunters and there were *tons* of animals. Apparently, there were something like 10 million mammoth carcasses in the Siberian tundra alone! Plus, it could be that some of the animals, especially in Australia and the Americas, just weren't smart enough to run away.
And some of these lost creatures, they were kinda wild to think about. Giant sloths peeking in your upstairs window. Tortoises as big as, like, small cars. Six-meter-long lizards sunbathing on the side of the road. Gone. All gone. We live on a much less varied planet because of it. Today, we only have four kinds of really big (a ton or more) land animals: elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes. Earth has never been this empty and tame.
So, the question is: are these extinctions from the Stone Age, and the more recent ones, part of the same, bigger extinction event? Is humanity, basically, bad news for the rest of life on Earth? And, sadly, the answer is probably yes. One paleontologist figured, like, the average rate of extinction throughout history has been about one species per year. But then, some other researchers estimate that humans are now causing extinctions at a rate of 120,000 times faster than that.
There's this Australian guy, Tim Flannery, who started to realize that we just don't know much about many of the species we've driven to extinction, even the recent ones. Like, wherever you look, there are gaps in the records. Either they're incomplete, like with the dodo, or there's just nothing at all.
So, he hired this artist, Peter Schouten, and they started going through museum collections, trying to figure out what was missing, what we'd forgotten, what we never knew in the first place. For four years, they dug through old skins, smelly specimens, old paintings, written descriptions… anything they could find. Then, Schouten painted accurate, life-size portraits of the animals, and Flannery wrote about them. The result was this amazing book, "A Gap in Nature," which is probably the most complete, and definitely the most vivid, record of animal extinctions in the last 300 years.
Some of these animals, even though there's, like, some information available, often go unstudied for years, or just completely forgotten. Steller's sea cow, which was a relative of the manatee, was one of the last big animals to go extinct. And they were huge! Like, nine meters long and ten tons! And the only reason we know about them is because a Russian expedition shipwrecked on the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea in 1741.
Luckily, the expedition had a naturalist, Georg Steller, who was fascinated by the animal. He wrote all sorts of notes, measured the length of its whiskers, everything. Except, for some reason, he refused to describe the male sea cow's genitals, but was perfectly happy to describe the female's. He even brought back a piece of skin, so we know what their fur looked like. But, we’re not always so lucky.
Thing is, Steller couldn't save the sea cows. Hunting wiped them out completely within 27 years of his discovery. And there are tons of other animals that we can’t even document because we know so little about them. Darling Downs hopping mouse, the Chatham Island swan, the Ascension flightless rail, at least five kinds of giant tortoises… the list goes on and on. All we have is their names.
Flannery and Schouten found that a lot of extinctions weren't due to, like, malice or greed, but just plain stupidity. Take the Stephen Island wren, for example. In 1894, they built a lighthouse on this tiny island in New Zealand. The lighthouse keeper's cat kept bringing him weird little birds. He sent a few to the museum in Wellington, and the curator was thrilled! It was a flightless wren, only one ever found that could perch! He rushed to the island, but by the time he got there, the cat had killed them all. All that's left now are twelve specimens in the museum.
At least we have specimens of the wren! But, it turns out we're not any better at caring for species after they go extinct than we are before. Take the Carolina parakeet, for instance. Bright green, yellow head, was once considered the most beautiful bird in North America. Used to be super abundant. But farmers saw them as pests, and they were easy to kill because they flew in flocks, and they had this weird habit of… you know, when they heard a gunshot, they'd fly up, but then immediately fly back down to check on their fallen friends.
One guy in the early 1800s, he wrote that he shot a bunch of them out of a tree, and after each shot, the survivors seemed to get more attached, flying around the spot and looking down at their dead companions with such sympathy that he just couldn't bring himself to shoot anymore.
By the 1920s, they were hunted to near extinction, with just a few left in zoos. The last one, named Inca, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, and they made a specimen out of it. But guess what? The zoo lost it. Nobody knows where it is.
And the crazy thing is, that the guy who wrote about being so moved by the parakeets... he didn't hesitate to shoot a bunch of them in the first place! He had no reason! He just did it for fun. For a long time, the people most interested in the world's creatures were often the ones most likely to kill them.
One prime example is Lionel Walter Rothschild, the Second Baron Rothschild. He was a super-rich banker, kind of eccentric, and spent his whole life, from 1868 to 1937, in the nursery of his family's mansion, using the same furniture he had as a child. And he was obsessed with natural history and became a crazy collector. He sent hundreds of trained people all over the world to find new specimens, especially flying ones. They'd ship the stuff back to Rothschild's estate, and he and his team would catalog and study it all, publishing books, collections, and papers. All told, Rothschild's "natural history workshop" processed over two million specimens and added over 5,000 new species to the scientific record.
Unbelievably, Rothschild's collection wasn't even the biggest of the 19th century, based on scale and investment. That honor probably goes to Hugh Cuming. Cuming was so into collecting that he had a huge ship built and hired a full-time crew to go all over the world collecting stuff: birds, plants, animals, especially seashells.
Rothschild, though, was probably the most scientifically minded collector of the time, and also one of the most tragic killers. In the 1890s, he became interested in Hawaii, which was one of the most amazing and vulnerable places on Earth. Millions of years of isolation had led to the evolution of over 8,800 unique species of plants and animals. Rothschild was especially interested in the colorful, rare birds, which often had small populations and limited ranges.
The sad thing about many Hawaiian birds is that they were unique, beautiful, rare, and… often ridiculously easy to catch. The larger koa finch, a harmless songbird, would often sit shyly in the shade of the koa trees, but if you imitated its call, it would fly right down to you. The last koa finch was killed by Rothschild's top guy, Harry Palmer, in 1896. Five years earlier, a relative of the koa finch, the tiny little lesser koa finch, was shot by Rothschild himself. Over a decade, Rothschild’s collection led to the extinction of at least nine species of Hawaiian birds, and maybe more.
And Rothschild wasn't the only one who was obsessed with killing birds at almost any cost. In 1907, a collector named Alanson Bryan said he was "thrilled" to learn that he'd shot the last three black mamo, a bird that had only been discovered in the forests about ten years earlier.
It was just a crazy time, where anything considered slightly threatening was treated brutally. New York State paid out over a hundred bounties for mountain lions in 1890, even though the poor things were clearly on the verge of extinction. Up until the 1940s, many states in America were still paying bounties for pretty much any kind of predator. In West Virginia, they even gave out college scholarships to the people who killed the most "vermin," which basically meant anything that wasn't a farm animal or a pet.
Maybe nothing illustrates the insanity of the era better than the story of the Bachman's warbler. This bird, native to the American South, was known for its beautiful song. But it was always rare, and by the 1930s, it had basically disappeared. Then, in 1939, two birders, completely separately, stumbled upon a few survivors in different locations, and they both shot them.
And it wasn't just happening in America. In Australia, they had a bounty on the Tasmanian tiger (actually a thylacine), which was a dog-like animal with tiger stripes on its back. Until the last one died quietly in a private zoo in Hobart in 1936. Today, if you go to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and ask to see the last one… the only large carnivorous marsupial to survive into modern times… all they can show you is a photograph and a 61-second clip of old film. The body of the last thylacine was thrown out with the weekly trash.
I say all this to make a point: if you were going to pick a species to be the caretaker of life in this lonely universe, the one to monitor where things are going, to document where they've been… you wouldn't pick us.
But, the reality is: we're stuck with it. Whether it's fate, divine providence, or whatever you want to call it. As far as we know, we're the best there is. We might be the smartest, we might be the most capable, but we're also the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to this planet. It's kind of depressing.
We're so careless about our job of caretaker that we don't even know how many species have gone extinct, are going extinct, or will never go extinct. We don't even know what role we're playing in it. One estimate said that human activity was causing the extinction of two species per week. Then, they revised it to almost 600 per week! (That includes plants, insects, everything.) Others say it's more like a thousand per week. Meanwhile, a UN report said that, in the past 400 years, we know of about 500 animal extinctions and 650 plant extinctions… but that those numbers are "almost certainly underestimates," especially for tropical species. Then some people think that most estimates are exaggerations.
The truth is, we have no idea. Absolutely no idea. We don't know when a lot of what we're doing started. We don't know what we're doing now. And we don't know what the effects of our actions will be in the future. All we know is that we have one planet, and only one species has the power to change its fate. As Edward O. Wilson put it so perfectly: "One planet, one experiment."
If this chapter teaches us anything, it's that we're incredibly lucky to be here. And by "we," I mean all of us. Every form of life is a miracle. But as humans, we're doubly lucky. We not only get to exist, but we also have the unique ability to appreciate that existence, and to even make it better in so many ways. It’s a skill we're only just starting to master.
We've gotten to this point in a ridiculously short amount of time. Modern humans have only been around for, like, one-ten-thousandth of the Earth's history. We're just getting started. The trick is to make sure we get it right, and to keep it going, you know? And that, almost certainly, is going to take more than just luck.