So when, why, where do ideas of extinction begin to develop? So

there are suggestions that things have been lost, species have been lost before in the natural world, such as the dodo, but that's usually because of human intervention.

But over the course of the 18th century, things start to be dug up that are very, very puzzling.

These got what we might call petrified beasts, like what we would now recognise as fossils.

But they often don't look like anything alive that people know about.

And so that starts raising questions about how can we explain what these things are and where are they? And then slowly, there are particular kinds of examples that get paid particular lots of attention to.

So, for instance, one of the really most interesting examples is something like these elephantine beasts, like the mammoth or the mastodon that are being dug up in Siberia, in Ohio, in America.

So where do we start to see those sorts of debates coming in? Were those similar debates back then versus the ones we're having now? So it depends

So when, why, where do ideas of extinction begin to develop? So

there are suggestions that things have been lost, species have been lost before in the natural world, such as the dodo, but that's usually because of human intervention.

But over the course of the 18th century, things start to be dug up that are very, very puzzling.

These got what we might call petrified beasts, like what we would now recognise as fossils.

But they often don't look like anything alive that people know about.

And so that starts raising questions about how can we explain what these things are and where are they? And then slowly, there are particular kinds of examples that get paid particular lots of attention to.

So for instance, One of the really most interesting examples is something like these elephantine beasts, like the mammoth or the mastodon that are being dug up in Siberia, in Ohio, in America.

So where do we start to see those sorts of debates coming in? Were those similar debates back then versus the ones we're having now?

So when, why, where do ideas of extinction begin to develop?

So there are suggestions that things have been lost, species have been lost before in the natural world, such as the dodo, but that's usually because of human intervention.

But over the course of the 18th century, things start to be dug up that are very, very puzzling.

These got what we might call petrified beasts, like what we would now recognise as fossils.

But they often don't look like anything alive that people know about.

And so that starts raising questions about how can we explain what these things are and where are they? And then slowly, there are particular kinds of examples that get paid particular lots of attention to.

So, for instance, one of the really most interesting examples is something like these elephantine beasts, like the mammoth or the mastodon that are being dug up in Siberia, in Ohio, in America.

So it depends

... what, what happened to the dodo? What is being done to try to bring the dodo back from the dead?

The dodo is this extraordinary story.

So Mauritius was an island that was known by Arab traders for many, many years, but it was only settled by the Portuguese and Dutch in the sixteen hundreds.

And because the island had no mammals, the dodo was, uh, what's, um, very naive, I guess, about, you know, what humans were or what mammals were.

And when-- as humans settled on the island, effe- essentially the Portuguese and Dutch used it as a kind of pit stop on trade voyages.

But it wasn't just the human beings that arrived, it was also the mammals they brought with them, so the pigs, the rats, the cats, the dogs, and so on.

And so these animals then go into that ecosystem and effectively start eat-- predating on the dodos themselves.

Sadia, did you come to this subject through your interest in imperial history? Because it seems such an imperial story, ex- the extinction of species.