Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

Rhino horns, which are made of keratin

It was about three feet wide and stippled

if there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

They were presented to Louis XV, who installed them in his museum, the Cabinet du Roi. Decades later, maps of the Ohio River valley were still largely blank, except for the Endroit où on a trouvé des os d'Éléphant—the "place where the elephant bones were found." (Today the "place where the elephant bones were found" is a state park in Kentucky known as Big Bone Lick.) Longueuil's bones confounded everyone who examined them.

not busy being born is busy dying.

Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent.

In one of the most often-quoted passages of On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers. Natural

The end-Permian or Permo-Triassic extinction was the biggest of the Big Five, an episode that came scarily close to eliminating multicellular life altogether.

Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything" Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: "We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it... We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

Her ruddy brown skin had the texture of pebbled linoleum.

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.)

I sought a career in herpetology because I enjoy working with animals," Joseph Mendelson, a herpetologist at Zoo Atlanta, has written. "I did not anticipate that it would come to resemble paleontology.

have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed

succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and

in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species.

Suci, a Sumatran rhino, lives at the Cincinnati Zoo

Darwin's familiarity with human-caused extinction is also clear from On the Origin of Species. In one of the many passages in which he heaps scorn on the catastrophists, he observes that animals inevitably become rare before they become extinct: "we know this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man's agency.

The modern humans "replaced" the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them to extinction.

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.