It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers. Darwin recognized that just as the features of the inorganic world-deltas, river valleys, mountain chains-were brought into being by gradual change, the organic world similarly was subject to constant flux.The last known surviving pair killed on Eldey Island in 1844. They were hunted to extinction in North America by the year 1800.The birds were used as fish bait, plucked feathers were used for stuffing mattresses, and their oily bodies used as fuel for the fire.

A 1622 account by a captain named Richard Whitbourne describes great auks being driven onto boats by the hundreds.The flightless bird was easy prey for Iceland’s medieval inhabitants.The great auk once ranged from Norway over to Newfoundland and probably from Italy to Florida, and its population probably numbered in the millions.Cuvier hypothesized that the globe was wracked periodically by cataclysms which resulted in mass extinctions.In the early years of the nineteenth century, fossil collecting became very popular among the English upper classes.He started paleontology-the branch of science concerned with fossil animals and plants. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier was the first to fully embrace the idea of extinction.Thomas Jefferson The Father of Paleontology Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. Thomas Jefferson partially agreed, but believed the animal was still alive and roaming the unexplored American territories.With great trepidation, France’s leading naturalist, Georges Buffon, was the first to propose that the giant unknown tooth came from a creature that seemed to have disappeared (the only land animal ever to have done so.).Extinction was not an understood phenomena until it finally emerged as a concept in revolutionary France.The American Mastodon, wooly mammoth, and African savanna elephant

The 6th extinction book