Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
He also compared the teeth of elephants and mammoths with those from Big Bone Lick.
The grinding surface of the teeth of one of the American specimens was covered with un-
usual knobs that resembled small breasts. This was a different species than the Siberian
mammoths, which had raised ridges on their teeth. He named the peculiar American speci-
men “mastodonte,” breast-tooth.
3
Cuvier concluded that there were three kinds of elephants. There were the modern Afric-
an and Asian species, the Siberian mammoth (which also had lived in North America), and
the mastodon, which was only found in North America. Although they were all herbivores,
mammoths ate grass and mastodons ate woody shrubs and trees. The uncomfortable fact
that both were extinct opened the door to seeing plants and animals as organic beings sub-
ject to change.
How many other species were extinct? When did they die off, and what was the world
like when they lived? Cuvier put his expertise in comparative anatomy to work by analyz-
ing fossils to reconstruct the inhabitants of vanished worlds. He found that whole faunas
preserved in stone were distinct from living species. His findings convinced him that an-
cient worlds were radically different from the one he knew. The world had a complicated
and dynamic history. Species came and went through time.
Cuvier thought that the story told by rocks and fossils roughly paralleled a nonliteral
reading of Genesis. He also thought that the story of Noah's Flood was the story of some
type of recent global catastrophe, which had wiped out large mammals known only through
their fossils, like mammoths. Cuvier maintained that the legends of the ancient Egyptians,
Greeks, and Jews all pointed to a grand disaster immediately prior to the dawn of human
history.
Cuvier sought to marshal observable facts to trace the history of the world and to under-
stand the sequence of grand disturbances, or revolutions that had punctuated earth history.
It seemed that life had turned over every now and then throughout geologic time. The story
Cuvier read was one that began with initial life-forms and transformed into a world of am-
monites and sea life. Then, a whole succession of worlds with novel terrestrial faunas ar-
rived, with people arriving in the most recent, modern world.
