In 1739, Baron de Longueiul, a pioneer explorer of the Ohio River Valley, discovered a spectacular phenomenon: in an area surrounding a salt spring in northern Kentucky, the physical remains of extinct Pleistocene mammals protruded from the ground. The site soon became known as Big Bone Lick and attracted the attention of both American and European scientists.
The idea of extinction posed a difficult problem for the scientific community during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An examination of a fossilized shark discovered in Italy in 1666 led Niels Stensen and Robert Hooke to theorize that fossils were of organic origin. While the Stensen-Hooke position was logical from an anatomical point of view, it threatened to unravel the cosmology of both Christian and deist.
The difficulty was that extinction unavoidably suggested some imperfection and incompleteness in the design of the original Creation. It thereby threatened not only the Christian doctrine of providence, but still more the older notion of plenitude with which that doctrine had become entangled. ~ Christian naturalists like John Ray desparately sought an alternative to the notion of extinction. Ray hypothesized that certain fossils were of inorganic origin, and that others represented the skeletal remains of exotic faunas that continued to exist. / Deists were just as perplexed regarding the issue. The deism of Enlightenment thought could not explain how or why a divine watchmaker could create an imperfect watch. If, indeed, a Su, preme Intelligence had designed the world to run by natural laws, 1