Quotes About Extinction

All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.

When the dinosaurs go extinct and 75 percent of life goes extinct after a meteor hits the planet, that's an era boundary. That's when we change from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. more than a rounding error.

We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized" is how one geologist put it to me.

If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.

Of the world's eight species of bears, six are categorized either as "vulnerable" to extinction or "endangered.

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals; it's been calculated that the group's extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.

When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species". (...) We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

It demonstrates, he has written, that humans "are capable of driving virtually any large mammal species extinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.

Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." When, as President, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region.

background extinction." In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs—extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years.

Researchers now believe it won't last out the Anthropocene. "It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct

Alroy has described the megafauna extinction as a "geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species's success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.

When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda.

the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their way to a region where Neanderthals were living, the Neanderthals in that region disappeared.

KINOHI'S tragicomic sex life provides more evidence—if any more was needed—of how seriously humans take extinction. Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows.

Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape.

Such is the economy of nature," he wrote, "that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct.