Quotes About Extinction

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, 'I wonder where we're headed.'

Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

You look at the fact that for millions of years species on earth have been developing and we've been knocking them off at like a hundred a day.

Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.

If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.'

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.

There's money to be made by driving a species extinct.

There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.

If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.

It's a fair guess that at the rate we're destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we're pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn't count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large-headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs.

I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct -- if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight.

A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth's past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth's flora and fauna–including all the famous outsized dinosaurs.

To date, around 99.9 percent of all species ever to have inhabited Earth have become extinct.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.