flint-headed spears and keen organizational capabilities. Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer to evolve a useful wariness of humans, lost between a third and a half of their big creatures. Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent.
Because the early hunter populations were comparatively small and the animal populations truly monumental-as many as ten million mammoth carcasses are thought to lie frozen in the tundra of northern Siberia alone-some authorities think there must be other explanations, possibly involving climate change or some kind of pandemic. As Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History put it: “There’s no material benefit to hunting dangerous animals more often than you need to-there are only so many mammoth steaks you can eat.” Others believe it may have been almost criminally easy to catch and clobber prey. “In Australia and the Americas,” says Tim Flannery, “the animals probably didn’t know enough to run away.”
Some of the creatures that were lost were singularly spectacular and would take a little managing if they were still around. Imagine ground sloths that could look into an upstairs window, tortoises nearly the size of a small Fiat, monitor lizards twenty feet long basking beside desert highways in Western Australia. Alas, they are gone and we live on a much diminished planet. Today, across the whole world, only four types of really hefty (a metric ton or more) land animals survive: elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes. Not for tens of millions of years has life on Earth been so diminutive and tame.
The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearances of more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event-whether, in short, humans are inherently bad news for other living things. The sad likelihood is that we may well be. According to the University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, the background rate of extinction on Earth throughout biological history has been one species lost every four years on average. According to one recent calculation, human-caused extinction now may be running as much as 120,000 times that level.
In the mid-1990s, the Australian naturalist Tim Flannery, now head of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, became struck by how little we seemed to know about many extinctions, including relatively recent ones. “Wherever you looked, there seemed to be gaps in the records-pieces missing, as with the dodo, or not recorded at all,” he told me when I met him in Melbourne a year or so ago.
Flannery recruited his friend Peter Schouten, an artist and fellow Australian, and together they embarked on a slightly obsessive quest to scour the world’s major collections to find out what was lost, what was left, and what had never been known at all. They spent four years picking through old skins, musty specimens, old drawings, and written descriptions-whatever was available. Schouten made life-sized paintings of every animal they could reasonably re-create, and Flannery wrote the words. The result was an extraordinary book called
For some animals, records were good, but nobody had done anything much with them, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. Steller’s sea cow, a walrus-like creature related to the dugong, was one of the last really big animals to go extinct. It was truly enormous-an adult could reach lengths of nearly thirty feet and weigh ten tons-but we are acquainted with it only because in 1741 a Russian expedition happened to be shipwrecked on the only place where the creatures still survived in any numbers, the remote and foggy Commander Islands in the Bering Sea.
Happily, the expedition had a naturalist, Georg Steller, who was fascinated by the animal. “He took the most copious notes,” says Flannery. “He even measured the diameter of its whiskers. The only thing he wouldn’t describe was the male genitals-though, for some reason, he was happy enough to do the female’s. He even saved a piece of skin, so we had a good idea of its texture. We weren’t always so lucky.”
The one thing Steller couldn’t do was save the sea cow itself. Already hunted to the brink of extinction, it would be gone altogether within twenty-seven years of Steller’s discovery of it. Many other animals, however, couldn’t be included because too little is known about them. The Darling Downs hopping mouse, Chatham Islands swan, Ascension Island flightless crake, at least five types of large turtle, and many others are forever lost to us except as names.
A great deal of extinction, Flannery and Schouten discovered, hasn’t been cruel or wanton, but just kind of majestically foolish. In 1894, when a lighthouse was built on a lonely rock called Stephens Island, in the tempestuous strait between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, the lighthouse keeper’s cat kept bringing him strange little birds that it had caught. The keeper dutifully sent some specimens to the museum in Wellington. There a curator grew very excited because the bird was a relic species of flightless wrens-the only example of a flightless perching bird ever found anywhere. He set off at once for the island, but by the time he got there the cat had killed them all. Twelve stuffed museum species of the Stephens Island flightless wren are all that now exist.
At least we have those. All too often, it turns out, we are not much better at looking after species after they have gone than we were before they went. Take the case of the lovely Carolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking and beautiful bird ever to live in North America-parrots don’t usually venture so far north, as you may have noticed-and at its peak it existed in vast numbers, exceeded only by the passenger pigeon. But the Carolina parakeet was also considered a pest by farmers and easily hunted because it flocked tightly and had a peculiar habit of flying up at the sound of gunfire (as you would expect), but then returning almost at once to check on fallen comrades.
In his classic
At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the birds had been so relentlessly hunted that only a few remained alive in captivity. The last one, named Inca, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 (not quite four years after the last passenger pigeon died in the same zoo) and was reverently stuffed. And where would you go to see poor Inca now? Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.
What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so. It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.
No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild. Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was a strange and reclusive fellow. He lived his entire life in the nursery wing of his home at Tring, in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhood-even sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.
His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects. He sent hordes of trained men-as many as four hundred at a time-to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountains and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens-particularly things that flew. These were crated or boxed up and sent back to Rothschild’s estate at Tring, where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged and analyzed everything that came before them, producing a constant stream of books, papers, and monographs-some twelve hundred in all. Altogether, Rothschild’s natural history factory processed well over two million specimens and added five thousand species of creature to the scientific archive.
Remarkably, Rothschild’s collecting efforts were neither the most extensive nor the most generously funded of the nineteenth century. That title almost certainly belongs to a slightly earlier but also very wealthy British collector named Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large oceangoing ship and employed a crew to sail the world full-time, picking up whatever they could find-birds, plants, animals of all types, and especially shells. It was his unrivaled collection of barnacles that passed to Darwin and served as the basis for his seminal study.
However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably
