How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America by John Dvorak

Author:John Dvorak [Dvorak, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, mountains, science, Earth Sciences, General, Geology
ISBN: 9781643135755
Google: AHjSDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-08-03T23:36:13.551442+00:00

12 Extinction

Deccan Traps: 66.4 to 65.6 Million Years Ago

As late as the eighteenth century, many Americans and Europeans held the worldview that the natural world, because it had been created by a benevolent God, was perfect and complete. It had exactly as much variety, especially in its many life-forms, as was needed to maintain a world of perfection created by a divine hand. Any addition or deletion would disrupt the harmony, would break the chain that linked all living things. And so, it was reasoned, life on the planet must never have changed: Animal species were immutable and no animal species had ever gone extinct.

Also by the eighteenth century, many Americans and Europeans had accepted the idea that the abundance of relics that were being dug out of the ground that had the familiar shape of leaves and branches or that looked like the skeletal remains of animals were exactly that: The mineralized remains of plants and animals that had lived long ago. The shells of turtles and the delicate skeletons of fish had been recovered. So had the fragmentary remains of animals that had once stood and walked and scurried around on four legs.

That these fossilized relics were found in abundance could also be explained: They were then unfortunate victims of the terrifying storms and worldwide flood that God had sent to punish those who were wicked and who were evil and, in the process, had drowned most of the animal life. But there was a problem with this explanation: If the drowned animals had been found in such abundance, where were the bones of the people, the sinners, who had drowned in the biblical flood?

A possible resolution to the problem came in 1706 when it was reported that a fossilized tooth, seemingly similar in shape to that of a human tooth, was found along a riverbank of the Hudson River a few miles south of the frontier settlement of Albany, New York. The discoverers presented the tooth to the governor of Massachusetts, John Dudley, who recorded that it had been given to him “by two honest dutchmen.” They also gave him “some other pieces of bone,” some rather large. Dudley could make nothing of the bones. But of the tooth, after consulting with several local physicians, Dudley came to the “(perfect) opinion, that the tooth will agreee only to a human body.” Furthermore, he suggested that it had come from someone who had succumbed to a flood, someone who had “waded as long as he could keep his head above water.” But the ordeal had been too much. The sinner had become entombed in “the new sediment [deposited] after the flood,” and that is where the tooth had been found.

Dudley wrote to the Boston preacher Cotton Mather about the discovery and he came to a similar conclusion, certain that this relic had come from someone “interr’d by the Flood.” Mather wrote a description of the tooth and sent it to the Royal Society of London where it was published in the transactions of the society.

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