Chapter Content
**Chapter 44: A Single Orb, A Solitary Trial**
The early 1680s saw intellectual titans like Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke engaged in a casual wager within the hallowed halls of a London coffeehouse. Unbeknownst to them, this seemingly trivial bet would eventually blossom into Isaac Newton's *Principia Mathematica*, Henry Cavendish's monumental work on Earth's density, and many other awe-inspiring achievements chronicled earlier in this narrative. Yet, simultaneously, a far less celebrated tragedy was unfolding some eight hundred miles off the eastern coast of Madagascar, on the idyllic island of Mauritius.
There, an anonymous sailor, or perhaps a pampered pet in his care, was likely contributing to the final demise of the dodo. The flightless bird, notorious for its naiveté and lumbering gait, was an irresistible target for bored seafarers seeking amusement on their shore leave. Millions of years of isolated existence had left it pathetically unprepared for the irrational cruelty of humankind.
The precise circumstances of the dodo's disappearance, and the exact year of its extinction, remain shrouded in uncertainty. Therefore, it is impossible to definitively declare whether Newton's *Principia* predates the dodo's final departure, but what we can safely say is that these two events occurred almost in lockstep. It is difficult, I venture to suggest, to find a more potent illustration of the paradoxical nature of humanity—a singular species capable of unlocking the universe's most profound enigmas, while simultaneously orchestrating the senseless obliteration of a creature that posed no threat, indeed, one that was likely oblivious to the very notion of its impending doom. So trusting and dim-witted was the dodo, that legend held that capturing one would summon the rest, lured by the cries of their captured kin to witness the spectacle unfolding around them.
The desecration of the unfortunate dodo did not end with its physical annihilation. Approximately seventy years after the last bird had vanished, in 1755, the curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, upon discovering that the museum's dodo specimen was riddled with mold, ordered his subordinates to incinerate it. A bewildering decision, considering it was one of the few – indeed, perhaps the *only* – tangible vestiges of the bird’s existence. A passing employee, aghast at this act of barbarism, attempted to rescue the bird from the flames, managing to salvage only the head and a fragment of its leg.
As a consequence of this, alongside similar acts of irrationality, we are now left with an incomplete picture of the living dodo. Our understanding is far more fragmented than most realize. As the 19th-century naturalist H.R. Strickland lamented, with thinly veiled exasperation, all that remains of the dodo consists of “a few scanty notices from illiterate mariners,” “three or four pictures, and a few scattered bones." According to Strickland, we possess more comprehensive information on ancient sea monsters and colossal sauropods than we do on a creature that coexisted with modern humans, asking nothing more than to be left in peace.
Taken as a whole, our knowledge about the dodo amounts to this: it dwelled on Mauritius, it was plump though reputedly unappetizing, and it was the largest member of the pigeon and dove family. Yet, its precise size remains undetermined, its weight never accurately recorded. Drawing inferences from the "scattered bones" mentioned by Strickland, as well as the Ashmolean remnants, we can estimate a height of approximately eighty centimeters, its length from beak to tail nearly equal. Unable to take flight, it nested on the ground, rendering its eggs and hatchlings easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys introduced to the island. It likely disappeared around 1683 and was almost certainly extinct by 1693. Beyond this skeletal outline, we know almost nothing. We will never witness it again. We remain ignorant of its mating rituals, its dietary habits, the territories it roamed, or the sounds it made in times of tranquility or distress. Not even a single dodo egg has been preserved for posterity.
Our shared existence with the living dodo spanned a mere seventy years. An alarmingly fleeting period – though, admittedly, by this stage in our history, we had already embarked on a millennia-long spree of irreversible species extinction. The full extent of human destructiveness remains an elusive figure, but one irrefutable truth endures: for roughly the past five thousand years, wherever we venture, animals tend to vanish, often in staggering numbers.
Between twenty thousand and ten thousand years ago, following the arrival of modern humans on the American continents, some thirty species of megafauna – some truly enormous – vanished in a seemingly instantaneous event. Across North and South America, nearly three-quarters of all large animals succumbed to the coordinated assaults of hunters wielding flint-tipped spears. Even in Europe and Asia, where animals had evolved a more ingrained wariness of humans, between one-third and one-half of the megafauna vanished. But in Australia, where creatures had not yet developed a healthy fear of people, fully 95 percent of the megafauna were lost forever.
Considering that early hunter-gatherer populations were relatively sparse, while animal populations were immense – purportedly, up to ten million mammoth carcasses have been discovered in the frozen tundra of northern Siberia alone – certain authorities posit alternative explanations for these mass extinctions. These range from climatic shifts to widespread epidemics. As Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History observed, "People don't have to kill dangerous animals that often - there are plenty of mammoths to go around." Some suggest that the animals were simply too easy to catch. "In Australia and the Americas," argues Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't quite realize that they should run away.”
Among the vanished creatures were some truly remarkable beings, beings whose presence today would necessitate a considerable degree of management. Imagine ground sloths peering through your upstairs windows, tortoises the size of compact cars, six-meter-long lizards basking in the desert sun beside Western Australian highways. Alas, they are gone. We, the human race, live on an impoverished planet. Currently, only four species of large (weighing a ton or more) land animals survive worldwide: elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and giraffes. But, for tens of millions of years before our arrival, life on Earth was never so meager, never so docile.
The critical question emerges: Were the megafaunal extinctions of the Stone Age and the modern era merely disparate episodes, or were they component parts of a single extinction event - in essence, is the arrival of humankind bad news for other forms of life? Regrettably, the answer is probably yes. According to the paleobiologist David Raup, the average rate of species extinction throughout biological history has been approximately one species per year. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, in their book *The Sixth Extinction*, suggest that human-caused extinctions may now be occurring at a rate 120,000 times greater.
In the mid-1990s, Tim Flannery, then a naturalist at the Australian Museum, now the director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, began to feel troubled by how little we actually knew about so many extinct species, even those that had recently disappeared. “Everywhere you look, you find major gaps in the record - fragmentary accounts, as with the dodo, or no record at all,” he told me in Melbourne in early 2002.
Flannery enlisted the help of his friend Peter Schouten, an Australian wildlife artist. Together, they embarked on a painstaking survey of the world's major natural history collections, seeking to identify what had been lost, what had been overlooked, and what we were wholly ignorant of. They spent four years sifting through old pelts, malodorous specimens, antique paintings, written descriptions – whatever they could unearth. Schouten then painted each animal, as faithfully as possible, in life-size detail, while Flannery wrote the accompanying text. The result was a book titled *A Gap in Nature*, which constitutes the most comprehensive – and, it must be said, most poignant – record of animal extinctions over the past three centuries.
Some animals, despite having relatively substantial records, have been either long forgotten or entirely ignored for years. Steller's sea cow, a relative of manatees and dugongs, and one of the last large mammals to become extinct, is a case in point. It was truly massive – adults reaching up to nine meters in length and ten tons in weight – yet we only know of it because a Russian expedition shipwrecked on the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea in 1741. In that remote, fog-shrouded locale, a small population of sea cows still thrived.
Fortunately, the expedition included a naturalist named Georg Steller, who became fascinated by these creatures. “He made copious notes," Flannery said, “He even measured the length of their whiskers. The only thing he didn't describe was the male genitalia - although, for some reason, he went into considerable detail on the female organs. He even brought back a piece of hide, so we have a good understanding of the texture of their skin. But we aren't always so lucky."
One thing Steller could not do was save the sea cow itself. Already hunted to near extinction, the species was entirely wiped out within twenty-seven years of his discovery. Tragically, there are countless other creatures whose stories remain largely untold, simply because we know too little about them. The Darling Downs hopping mouse, the Chatham Island swan, the Ascension Island flightless rail, at least five distinct types of giant tortoise, and countless others—we will never know anything more than their names.
Flannery and Schouten discovered that many extinctions occurred not through malice or avarice, but through a peculiar form of well-intentioned ineptitude. In 1894, on a lonely, wave-battered islet called Stephens Island, in the strait between New Zealand's North and South Islands, a lighthouse was constructed. The lighthouse keeper's cat began bringing strange little birds to its master. Being an upright citizen, the keeper sent some to the museum in Wellington. The curator was ecstatic: this was a new species of flightless wren - the only passerine ever discovered that lacked the ability to fly. The curator immediately set off to the island, but by the time he arrived, the cat had killed them all. The Stephens Island wren now survives only as twelve museum specimens.
At least, in the case of the wren, we have specimens. It turns out that we are often no better at looking after creatures *after* they are extinct than we were at caring for them when they were alive. Take, for example, the delightful Carolina parakeet, a small bird of brilliant emerald green plumage with a golden yellow head, once considered the most conspicuous and beautiful bird in North America – a place where you might think parrots wouldn't venture too far north. At its peak, it was so plentiful that only the passenger pigeon exceeded its numbers. But the birds were deemed pests by farmers, and they were extraordinarily vulnerable, as they flew in large, tight flocks and possessed the habit of flying up when they heard gunfire (as you might expect) but then immediately returning to see what had happened to their fallen comrades.
Charles Wilson Peale, in his monumental *Birds of America*, written in the early 19th century, described a scene where he fired repeatedly into a tree filled with parakeets:
At each discharge, though many fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted nearly on the same spot, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me.
By the 1920s, after decades of being hunted and persecuted, only a handful of parakeets survived in captivity. The last Carolina parakeet, named Inca, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 (less than four years after the last passenger pigeon died in the same zoo), and was duly preserved as a specimen. Where can you see poor Inca now? Nobody knows, because the zoo lost the specimen.
What is perhaps most unsettling about this story is that Peale, a self-proclaimed lover of birds, readily shot a substantial number of parakeets. He did so for no particular reason, simply out of idle curiosity. For a long time, those with the strongest interests in the world's creatures have often been the most likely to cause their demise. It's a disturbing truth.
A prime illustration of this, in every sense, is Lionel Walter Rothschild, the 2nd Baron Rothschild. Heir to a vast banking fortune, Rothschild was an eccentric and reclusive individual. He spent his entire life (1868-1937) confined to the nursery wing of his family's estate in Tring, Buckinghamshire, surrounded by the same furniture he had used as a child – even his bed was the same toddler's cot he had slept in as a boy, even though he eventually weighed 135 kilograms.
He was captivated by natural history, becoming a prodigious collector of specimens. He dispatched legions of trained professionals – at times exceeding four hundred individuals – to every corner of the globe, scaling mountains and hacking through jungles, all in pursuit of new specimens, especially those that flew. These specimens were crated and shipped back to Rothschild's estate in Tring. There, Rothschild and a team of assistants meticulously cataloged and studied them. On this basis, he published an astonishing array of books, journals, and papers – over 1,200 volumes in total. Rothschild's natural history workshop processed more than two million specimens, adding over 5,000 new species to the scientific record.
Remarkably, even Rothschild's immense collecting efforts were not the largest of the 19th Century, either in scale or investment. That distinction almost certainly belongs to an earlier, and equally wealthy, British collector by the name of Hugh Cuming. Cuming was so fanatical about collecting that he had a large ocean-going ship custom built, and employed full time crews, solely to gather specimens – birds, plants, animals of every sort, and especially shells – from all over the world. The barnacles he collected were later passed onto Darwin, as the basis for his studies on reproduction.
However, Rothschild was undeniably the most scientifically minded collector of the age, and also one of the most tragic agents of destruction. By the 1890s, his interests had turned to Hawaii, perhaps the most alluring and vulnerable place on Earth. Millions of years of isolation had fostered the evolution of 8,800 unique species of plants and animals. Rothschild was particularly drawn to the rare and vibrantly colored birds, often found in limited numbers and restricted habitats.
For many Hawaiian birds, the fatal combination was being distinct, desirable, rare and, crucially, remarkably easy to capture. The large koa finch, a harmless member of the honeycreeper family, would often perch, timid and unsuspecting, in the shade of the koa trees, but come down at once, as though to greet you, if you mimicked its song. The last koa finch was shot in 1896 by Harry Palmer, Rothschild's most accomplished field collector, and has never been seen since. Five years earlier, a closely related species, the diminutive small koa finch, known from a single specimen, had similarly vanished as a consequence of one of Rothschild’s shooting expeditions: it was shot dead and became part of Rothschild’s collection. In a decade or so, at least nine and possibly more Hawaiian bird species disappeared as a direct consequence of Rothschild's fastidious collecting.
Rothschild was not the only avian enthusiast willing to go to almost any lengths to acquire specimens, and others were more callous in their behavior. In 1907, when a prominent collector named Aaronson Bryan discovered he had shot the last three Kauai oo, a species of bird that had been discovered in the forests only ten years earlier, he exclaimed that the news filled him with "great elation."
In short, it was an age of unenlightenment – a time when nearly every animal deemed even slightly troublesome was subject to systematic persecution.
In 1890, the state of New York paid out over one hundred bounties for the killing of mountain lions in the eastern part of the state, despite the fact that the much-harassed lions were clearly on the verge of extinction. Many American states continued to pay bounties for killing virtually all forms of predator well into the 1940s. In West Virginia, university scholarships were annually awarded to those who killed the most "varmints" – “varmints” being defined as just about anything that wasn't livestock or a pet.
Perhaps nothing encapsulates the irrationality of this era more poignantly than the fate of Bachman's warbler, a delightful little bird, native to the American South, renowned for its exceptionally melodious song. But it was always rare, and it had apparently died out by the 1930s, not being seen for many years. Then, in 1939, two zealous birdwatchers, encountering a few surviving Bachman’s warblers at widely separated locations within just two days of each other, independently shot them.
This behavior wasn’t confined to America. In Australia, bounties were paid for the killing of the Tasmanian tiger (properly the thylacine), a dog-like creature distinguished by prominent tiger-like stripes across its back – until shortly before the last one of them 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 of these animals—the largest carnivorous marsupial to survive into modern times – all they can show you is a photograph and a sixty-one-second snippet of grainy, old film. The body of the last surviving thylacine was thrown away as part of a routine weekly cleaning.
I mention all of this to illustrate a point: If you were tasked with assigning some being to care for the life on this solitary orb, to monitor their comings and goings, to chronicle where they’ve been and where they are headed, you would not select humanity for the job.
Yet, the undeniable fact remains: we have been chosen – whether by fate, providence, or whatever label you wish to assign to the phenomenon. For better or worse, we are the best that there is. We may be the most intelligent, we may be the crown of creation, but we are also its most terrifying nightmare, and that is a profoundly sobering thought.
We are so inattentive to our stewardship of this planet that we have scant knowledge, either while things are living or after they have died, about how many species have become extinct, are on the verge of extinction, or will never become extinct, or what part we may be playing in the process - really have no idea. In his 1979 book, *The Sinking Ark*, author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing the extinction of two species per week. By the early 1990s, he had revised that figure to nearly six hundred species per week (including plant life, insects, and so on, as well as other animals). Others estimated the rate as even higher – more than a thousand species per week. On the other hand, a 1995 United Nations report stated that nearly 500 animal species and 650 plant species had become extinct in the past 400 years - and noted that this statistic was "almost certainly an underestimate," especially with regard to tropical species. Still others have suggested that most extinction data are significantly exaggerated.
The truth is, we don't know. We simply do not know. We don't know when much of what we are doing started. We don't know what we are doing now. And we don't know what the effects of our actions will be in the future. What we *do* know is that we have only one planet, and only one species with the capacity to alter its destiny. As Edward O. Wilson eloquently put it in his book *The Diversity of Life*: “One planet, one experiment.”
If this book carries any central message, it is that we are extraordinarily lucky to be here – and by "we," I mean all life. It is a miracle to get any kind of life at all in this universe. Of course, as humans, we are doubly fortunate. Not only do we enjoy the grace of existence, but we also uniquely possess the capacity to appreciate this existence, and even to make it better in many ways. That is a trick that we are only just beginning to learn.
In a relatively short span of time, we have attained a position of pre-eminence. In behavioral terms - that is to say, the capacity to speak, to create art, to organize complex and variegated activities - modern humans have existed for only one-ten-thousandth of the Earth's history - an impossibly short time. But even this brief existence has required a virtually unbroken chain of good fortune.
We are truly only at the beginning. The key, of course, is to ensure that we stay the course, and that there is no end. And for that, it is safe to say, good fortune alone will almost certainly not be enough.