Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

If evolution works the way it usually does," Silman said, "then the extinction scenario—we don't call it extinction, we talk about it as 'biotic attrition,' a nice euphemism—well, it starts to look apocalyptic.

armadillos that, in some cases, grew to be as large as Fiat 500s.

At the heart of Darwin's theory

According to an English seaman named Aaron Thomas, who sailed to Newfoundland on the HMS Boston: If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.

Their extended evolutionary history means that even groups of amphibians that, from a human perspective, seem to be fairly similar may, genetically speaking, be as different from one another as, say, bats are from horses.

It is believed that One Tree Island was created during a particularly vicious storm that occurred some four thousand years ago. (As one geologist who has studied the place put it to me, "You wouldn't have wanted to be there when that happened.")

9Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.

this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land.

The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

For the same reasons that local diversity has, as a general rule, been increasing, global diversity—the total number of different species that can be found worldwide—has dropped.

On our way over to see the bird

is "the denial of humanity's special status.

He's a burly man with sparse white hair and a white beard who looks like Santa might look if Santa, in the off-season, carried a tackle box.

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes

buried the lede. Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare. The notion that a sixth such event would be taking place right now, more or less in front of our eyes, struck me as, to use the technical term, mind-boggling.

Durrant stopped off at a commissary of sorts to pick up a selection of his favorite snacks.

LIKE the Jews, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef observe a lunar calendar.

living in four parks in the state of Assam. A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million; it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals.

The 'incredible frog hotel'—really a local bed and breakfast—...the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.

To stay under 2°C, global emissions would have to fall nearly to zero within the next several decades. To stave off 1.5°C, they'd have to drop most of the way toward zero within a single decade. This would entail, for starters: revamping agricultural systems, transforming manufacturing, scrapping gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, and replacing most of the world's power plants.

Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.

I like to think or say, some madness there.

recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.