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141 " On our way over to see the bird, "
― Elizabeth Kolbert , The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
142 " is “the denial of humanity’s special status. "
143 " Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes "
144 " Durrant stopped off at a commissary of sorts to pick up a selection of his favorite snacks. "
145 " LIKE the Jews, the corals of the Great Barrier Reef observe a lunar calendar. "
146 " 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. "
147 " Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods. "
148 " I like to think or say, some madness there. "
149 " recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million. "
150 " ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN, "
151 " If EVACC is a sort of ark, Griffith becomes its Noah, though one on extended duty, since already he’s been at things a good deal longer than forty days. "
152 " Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. "
153 " 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. "
154 " These included mealworms; a hairless, newborn mouse, known as a “pinky”; and the hindquarters of an adult mouse "
155 " 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. "
156 " 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. "
157 " 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. "
158 " noted that there “have been five great mass extinctions during the history of life on this planet. "
159 " THE SIXTH EXTINCTION "
160 " Among the many lessons that emerge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results. "
