What is the general synopsis on chapters 2 and 3 of the book The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert?

Chapter Two, please post your questions separately.

Through the ages not much attention was paid to extinct animals. For centuries there was no record keeping of animals that had gone extinct. It wasn’t until the time of revolution in France that the concept of extinction got attention when naturalist Jean-Leopold Cuvier of the Museum of Natural History in Paris began to study the American mastodon. The first mastodon molar was found in upstate New York in 1705 and sent off to London for study. The bones of a mastodon were discovered in 1739 by Charles le Moyne who was traveling down the Ohio River leading four hundred troops. He instructed his troops to pack up the bones which were later shipped to France.

The bones confounded the experts. The animal resembled an elephant but its teeth were not elephantine but rather carnivorous. Many naturalists thought the bones were from two or more animals. Fifty years after the bones were sent to France, Curvier began conducting research on them. He concluded that they were different species from elephants. He wondered what happened to the enormous animals and referred to them as lost species. He took note of other animals that had disappeared, leaving only bones behind. Curvier did not make a connection between the extinct animals and the concept of evolution, something he vehemently opposed. He did establish characteristics that distinguished herbivores from carnivores.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a colleague of Cuvier, advocated the “power of life” which compelled an organism to become increasingly complex. He opposed Cuvier’s extinction concept believing that there was no force that could wipe out a species. Curvier did not believe in evolution; for example, he did not accept that birds grew longer legs so they could wade in the water. However, Curvier did not have an explanation for the appearance of new species but that wasn’t his focus.

Curvier initially believed that the mammoth and mastodon had been wiped out by a single catastrophe. Later, he decided that multiple calamities were to blame. He believed that animals that were functioning successfully would not die out from a minor catastrophe; therefore, he felt their extinction was caused by a great, unknown event. He looked to the Bible as well as to the Hindu religion for evidence of these event. Some took a published paper on his theory as proof of the Great Flood. Cuvier’s theory has ultimately been proven wrong. However, his claims that there are life-changing events on earth that change the projector of species had credence. He was also accurate in his claim that the American mastodon had disappeared 13,000 years before.