The Great Auk and the Idea of Extinction

For most of the eighteenth century a species could not be lost, because the world was understood as complete. [A] Bones that matched no living animal were taken to belong to something still alive in a part of the world not yet visited, and this was a reasonable position rather than a stubborn one, since most of the world had in fact not yet been visited. [B]

[C] The great auk made the argument harder to maintain. It was a large flightless seabird of the North Atlantic, known to every fishing fleet, breeding on a handful of islands that could be counted and visited. [D] When the colonies were emptied one after another for feathers and oil, there was no unvisited region to which the survivors could be assigned. The last confirmed pair was killed in 1844, and by then collectors were already paying more for a skin than a fisherman earned in a season, which tells us that the disappearance was understood as it happened. What the auk supplied was not the evidence for extinction, which had been accumulating in the rocks for decades. It supplied a case in which the loss was recent, witnessed and unarguably caused by people, and a general idea does not become usable until somebody can point at an instance of it.