Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five.

As with any young species, this one's position is precarious.

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap.

One weedy species," the pair observed, "has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.

A recent study of pollen and animal remains on Easter Island concluded that it wasn't humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats that came along for the ride and then bred unchecked. The native palms couldn't produce seeds fast enough to keep up with their appetites.)

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed, and they remained in that state for at least half a million, and perhaps as many as several million, years. (The desolate post-impact sea has been dubbed the "Strangelove ocean.")

A paper published in Nature by the former head of the One Tree Island Research Station, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, predicted that if current trends continue, then by around 2050 visitors to the Great Barrier Reef will arrive to find "rapidly eroding rubble banks.

not entirely clear why this is so, but one theory has it that the uplift of the Himalayas exposed vast expanses of rock to chemical weathering, and this in turn led to a drawdown of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At the start of this

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight.

all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

The first view I got of Suci was her prodigious backside.

Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. —JORGE LUIS BORGES

by the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen

Extinction finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France. It did so largely thanks to one animal, the creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and one man, the naturalist Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, known after a dead brother simply as Georges.

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

by a pair of herpetologists. It was titled "Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?

He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning 'wing-fingered.

a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man -- the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories -- will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.