Extinction - History of Scientific Understanding

History of Scientific Understanding

When it was first described in the 1750s, the idea of extinction was threatening to those who held a belief in the Great Chain of Being, a theological position that did not allow for "missing links".

The possibility of extinction was not widely accepted before the 1800s. The devoted naturalist Carl Linnaeus, could "hardly entertain" the idea that humans could cause the extinction of a species. When parts of the world had not been thoroughly examined and charted, scientists could not rule out that animals found only in the fossil record were not simply "hiding" in unexplored regions of the Earth. Georges Cuvier is credited with establishing extinction as a fact in a 1796 lecture to the French Institute. Cuvier's observations of fossil bones convinced him that they did not originate in extant animals. This discovery was critical for the spread of uniformitarianism, and led to the first book publicizing the idea of evolution though Cuvier himself strongly opposed the theories of evolution advanced by Lamarck and others.