Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

If EVACC is a sort of ark, Griffith becomes its Noah, though one on extended duty, since already he's been at things a good deal longer than forty days.

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity

The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have -or have not- inherited the earth.

These included mealworms; a hairless, newborn mouse, known as a "pinky"; and the hindquarters of an adult mouse

If, on the other hand, people were to blame—and it seems increasingly likely that they were—then the import is almost more disturbing. It would mean that the current extinction event began all the way back in the middle of the last ice age. It would mean that man was a killer—to use the term of art an "overkiller"—pretty much right from the start.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species." As Walter Alvarez put it to me, "We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

When the chronology of extinction is critically set against the chronology of human migrations," Paul Martin of the University of Arizona wrote in "Prehistoric Overkill," his seminal paper on the subject, "man's arrival emerges as the only reasonable answer" to the megafauna's disappearance.

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

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

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.)

We live in a world," he has said, "where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.

The windowless room where the po`ouli cells are kept alive—sort of—is called the Frozen Zoo.

All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often, when the opportunity arose, and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then, eventually, all the way down to zero.

number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago

Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote.

When a mass extinction occurs, it takes out the weak and also lays low the strong.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.

we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos

The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.

Then the frogs around El Valle started to disappear.

The name is trademarked

We're no at about 1.1, 1.2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and the conclusion is that this is already too much. The Arctic sea ice, for example, has been melting far more rapidly than was predicted. We're seeing the Greenland ice sheet beginning to melt more quickly that was predicted. So how do we with this? Sir David King, chief science adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair.