In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it began to be apparent to scientists that many fossilized specimens being discovered did not represent any organisms that were currently living on earth. The Irish elk was among these specimens. Neither exclusive to Ireland or an elk, it was named so because the most well-known and most preserved fossil specimens have been found in in lake sediments and peat bogs in Ireland. The Irish elk had a far-reaching range; being located throughout Europe, northern Africa, and some related forms located in China. The first scientists’ descriptions of the elk erroneously confused the animal with the American moose, while other scientists believed the elk was identical to the European reindeer. These scientists did not have the current conception of evolutionary biology that we have now. They couldn’t comprehend that a species that once roamed the earth was no longer alive at the present. They believed that the unexplained fossils had living ancestors in undiscovered parts of the globe. French scientist Georges Cuvier was the first to challenge that notion, documenting that the Irish elk did not belong to any species of mammal that was living at the time. His study of the Irish elk was a key moment in the history of the study of extinction.