Understanding of Extinction Begins with the Elephant

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Health Editor’s Note: Humans must stop killing elephants. We need nothing of what they have to enhance our lives.  Elephants should be able to have areas in which to live, roam, raise young….We do not need to use every inhabitable inch of the earth for human consumption and habitation….Carol

What Elephants Teach Us About Consumption and Extinction

by Rachael Lallensack/Smithsonian.com

In a way, our modern understanding of extinction starts with the elephant.



It was while studying fossilized teeth of two different elephant ancestors, the mammoth and the mastodon, that scientists first became aware of the fact that species could die out and become forever extinct. In 1796, French naturalist George Cuvier compared mastodon and mammoth tooth fossils to the teeth of modern African and Asian elephants, positing that the teeth belonged to species that were “lost” in the past. This was a bold, new revelation—one that stood in stark contrast to attitudes of the time. The massive consumption of ivory in the 1800s was unprecedented; with delicate fans, billiard balls, hair combs and ivory veneer piano keys being made of the tusks elephants use as tools for eating, drinking and breathing.

In a Connecticut newspaper, published the same year as Cuvier’s hypothesis, one observer wrote:

The Elephant is the largest, the strongest, the most sagacious, and the longest-lived of all brute creation. The species is numerous, does not decrease, and is dispersed over all of the southern parts of Asia and Africa.

Elephants were indeed seen as innumerous. By 1850, American manufacturers were killing the animals in droves. A billiard ball company boasted it had brought down 1,140 elephants.

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