Quotes About Extinction

When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to eight tons and reached a height of twenty feet.

In the Pacific Ocean, the main wave of extinction began in about 1500 BC, when Polynesian farmers settled the Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Caledonia. They killed

Mucho antes de la revolución industrial, Homo sapiens ostentaba el récord entre todos los organismos por provocar la extinción del mayor número de especies de plantas y animales.

Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island. Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological

The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island. Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools. This

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they'd be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of.

Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps

Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.

mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools. This ecological tragedy was restaged

Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The

Our children's books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees –in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 100 pounds. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2

He who refuses to learn deserves extinction.

That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it "the fatal adaptation.

Birds are facing change on a scale unknown in their evolutionary history. This is a result of the Anthropocene—the new epoch of man-made change that is contributing to what has been called the sixth mass extinction.

If you ever find yourself thinking that a mass human extinction event would be good for population control, you might want to get checked out.

If humanity continues to consume natural resources irresponsibly and disrupt the balance of nature that provides human life, it will be inevitable that we will encounter the catastrophe of total extinction in less than a hundred years.

Species went extinct and new ones evolved from protozoa while he sat in his car in the dark and waited to see how badly he'd fucked this up.

People ask me, why bother cataloging earthworms? Well, why catalog anything? It's how we learn about the world we live in. Besides, some of these worms are going extinct. How do you know what you're losing if you don't know what you have?

If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.