A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [237]
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 A Gap in Nature, constituting the most complete—and, it must be said, moving—catalog of animal extinctions from the last three hundred years.
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,