Quotes About Extinction

Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.

pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat.

the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one

It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery.

It was one of almost 20 global mass extinctions in the history of complex life, a list that includes 5 cataclysmic outliers, when the planet nearly died

There is a word, sad and resonant, for the last member of a dying species. The word is endling.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Dinosaurs and dodos come and go, and we?

Science suggests that the asteroid strike that destroyed the dinosaurs was not going to be an isolated event, for example. There was always the possibility of more impacts.", FADE by Kailin Gow

The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all-inclusive... The large animals that had given the name to the period became extinct. Their death marked the end of the era. But how did they die? What caused the extinction of forty million animals?

Diego, a giant tortoise, single-handedly saved his species from extinction. As one of the few surviving representatives of his kind, he was moved from an American zoo to a breeding program on the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador. Diego's unrelenting mating efforts helped raise the number of these tortoises from just fifteen to two thousand. One hundred years old, Diego keeps going.

Nos hemos convertido en un caso de manual: la única especie animal, junto con la rata topo, que extermina a sus propios individuos.

Extinction is the natural escalation of this war," Leshwi whispered. "If you forget why you are fighting, then victory itself becomes the goal.

El dodo no sabía lo que era un enemigo. Y por eso, lógicamente, lo consideraron tonto.

The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone, — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!

When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions - the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

Twelve years ago, when I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation for 'Thunderheart,' I was dong research into Native American horses that had come into extinction. I was tracing certain Lakota bloodlines, and it became an obsession.

In recent years, our planet has been warming at an alarming rate and seen record-breaking temperatures. We are now witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the earth's geologic history. Our sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, threatening our largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.