Committee:

Anthony Grafton, co-adviser
Jennifer Rampling, co-adviser
D. Graham Burnett
Sara Miglietti, University of London

Abstract:

According to most historians, the idea of extinction was born when the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier reconstructed lost megafauna in Ossemens fossiles (1812). Contrary to this origin myth, this dissertation unearths a longer, more exacting genealogy of this crucial concept, thereby challenging the widely held assumption that awareness of extinction is unique to modern history. Drawing on literary, visual, and material evidence that spans the domains of science, theology, poetry, and art, this dissertation recovers how the natural history of “lost species”—French espèces perdues, German verlorene Arten—already emerged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It provides the first book-length study of how the lost world came into being centuries before Victorian geologists turned dinosaurs into a global fascination.

This dissertation unravels the story of how ammonites—shells from the ancient marine world—came to symbolize the extinction of species. It begins in classical antiquity, when travelers and writers saw within many fossils the remains of ancient creatures. It progresses to Renaissance artisans who found in ammonite shells proof of man-made extinction and naturalists who debated them as “lost species”. It then moves on to the Royal Society of London, where natural philosophers turned these shells into memories of catastrophes, on to Enlightenment savants who turned them into the subject of belles-lettres, as well as a science that pinpointed the layer beneath the earth at which they ceased to exist. The story ends with the “age of monsters,” when dinosaurs replaced the old shell-science with extinct beings previously only the stuff of fables.

The key intervention of this dissertation is to reconceive extinction as a “problem of knowledge.” Although we now take the reality of extinction for granted, it was a fact that proved very difficult to observe and almost impossible to verify. The idea itself has been subject to debate for nearly five centuries. By considering the historicity of this knowledge and its contentious circumstances, this dissertation rethinks the history of extinction in both chronology and method.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.