Quotes About Extinction

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

Chicxulub crater.

Later, as his [Cuvier's] list of extinct species grew, his position changed. There had, he decided, been multiple cataclysms. "Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events," he wrote. "Living organisms without number have been victims of these catastrophes.

los neandertales siguieron el destino del Megatherium, el mastodonte americano, y de tantos otros desafortunados miembros de la megafauna. En otras palabras, tal como me lo expresó un investigador, «su mala suerte fuimos nosotros».

Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five.

IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.

Extinction finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France. It did so largely thanks to one animal, the creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and one man, the naturalist Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, known after a dead brother simply as Georges.

by a pair of herpetologists. It was titled "Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?

if there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent.

The end-Permian or Permo-Triassic extinction was the biggest of the Big Five, an episode that came scarily close to eliminating multicellular life altogether.

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

Darwin's familiarity with human-caused extinction is also clear from On the Origin of Species. In one of the many passages in which he heaps scorn on the catastrophists, he observes that animals inevitably become rare before they become extinct: "we know this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man's agency.

The modern humans "replaced" the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them to extinction.

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.

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." A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we're now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we're done, it's quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.

with the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.