Quotes About Extinction

During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

Then the frogs around El Valle started to disappear.

a third of them to be in danger of extinction, largely as a result of rising ocean temperatures.

Birds were also hard-hit; perhaps three-quarters of all bird families, perhaps more, went extinct.

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

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.

amphibian fossils are so rare.

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier