Extinction finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France. It did so largely thanks to one animal, the creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and one man, the naturalist Jean-Léopold- Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, known after a dead brother simply as Georges. Cuvier is an equivocal figure in the history of science. He was far ahead of his contemporaries yet also held many of them back; he could be charming and he could be vicious; he was a visionary and, at the same time, a reactionary. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many of
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