Quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert

Eubaculites carinatus indicated that the group had exhausted its practical possibilities and entered some sort of decadent, Lady Gaga-ish phase.)

it's estimated the population has shrunk by sixty percent just in the last two decades.

Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons

To paraphrase J. R. McNeill paraphrasing Marx, "Men make their own climate, but they do not make it just as they please.

sea ice covers just half the area it did thirty years ago

an amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually.

it's owing to Roth and the handful of others like her who know

would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.

useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary.

Once unloaded, everything has to be lugged through

Eating Animals" closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer's point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer's credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us.

Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn't finish the book.

in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity

When you find one thing that depends on something else that, in turn depends on something else, the whole series of interactions depends on constancy.

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.

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca

generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.

One theory has it that Bd was moved around the globe with shipments of African clawed frogs, which were used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties in pregnancy tests. (Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)

higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years.

In New England, 1816 became known as the "year without a summer" or "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.

This is the case even though 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.

vaccinated every single condor—today there about four hundred

Walter [Alvarez] dubbed the formation the "Crater of Doom." It became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.