The Living Fossil Record: Crafting Time and Place through Natural Historical Narratives of Persistence and Extinction

Abstract

The middle of the nineteenth century was in many ways the advent of the modern era for natural history as in broader North American culture. Each chapter in this dissertation centers an object of natural historical interest that represented a temporal anomaly or transition point for naturalists caught between eager anticipation of the advances of settler colonial modernity and sadness or unease at the destruction of nature that was narrativized as pre-historic. This ambivalent fascination with species, human groups, and environmental spaces that were made to represent a rapidly disappearing past was a driving force of the cultural reception of natural history during this era. Newfoundland and Labrador as North Atlantic colonial hinterlands served as a focal point for these hopes and anxieties. The effort to cast sea serpents, the Labrador Peninsula, and the great auk and Beothuk as contemporary relicts of a pre-modern age at the Atlantic margins of settler colonial reach was part of a larger effort at scientific storytelling that sought to justify the transformation of the natural world that colonialism had wrought. This project asks: what does it mean that naturalists in the nineteenth century sought to cast certain contemporary organisms, landscapes, and people as relicts of a prior era? What meaning did the “living fossil,” the “prehistoric landscape” and the “extinct” hold for a public grappling with recent serious shifts in their understanding of the age of the earth and the nature of species within deep time? The answers to this question are varied and complex but ultimately reveal that these temporal narratives were created by natural historians to explain and justify their own place in the contemporary era. The designation of relict or living fossil was a byproduct of the construction of natural historical modernity that was occurring simultaneously. This natural modernity was not defined by any quality of its own, but rather in opposition to those species, landscapes, and people narrativized as premodern. The process of narrativizing modernity has always been a careful balancing act, concerned with projecting confidence and yet fraught with anxiety. Concern for the human place within deep time and what natural science might suggest about the ultimate fate of modern civilization (and, implicitly or sometimes explicitly, the white race) was a current that ran through natural historical discussion of modernity during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This tension has been on display throughout this dissertation as natural historians attempted to explain and demarcate the passage of time using animal species, human groups, and landscapes as temporal landmarks to orient themselves.