The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

agreed-upon name and was variously referred to as an incognitum, an Ohio animal, and, most confusingly of all ...

apparently reminded him of nipples. (By this point, the animal had already received a scientific ...

upper classes that a whole new vocation sprang up. A “fossilist” was someone who made a liv ...

sticking up out of it like a scimitar. Cuvier identified this animal, too, as some sort of lizard. T ...

concept of evolution, or transformisme as it was known in Paris at the time, and he tried—generally, it seems ...

became ducks. Moles, having moved underground, stopped using their sight, and so over generations their ...

imagination of a poet,” they could not “for a moment bear the examination of anyone who has di ...

had never been observed by him or any other naturalist was another indication of nature’s mutability: in the ...

just prior to recorded history (and that the English interpreted as proof of the Deluge) was, in reality, ...

CHAPTER III THE ORIGINAL PENGUIN Pinguinus impennis The word “catastrophist” was coined in 1832 by William Whe ...

gradual processes operating over countless millennia—processes like sedimentation, erosion, and vulcanism ...

Lyell published his ideas in three thick volumes, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain ...

geologist had ever sold.) Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and w ...

theory only after his return to England, when other naturalists sorted out the jumble of specimens he had ...

Concepción’s harbor showed that the quake had elevated the beach by nearly eight feet. Once again, Lyel ...

coral reefs, wrote, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains.” LYELL, who saw change ...

offers. Natural selection eliminated the need for any sort of creative miracles. Given enough time for “ ...

“The complete extinction of the species of a group is generally a slower process than their produ ...

ten thousand British pounds to buy the auk back. (One woman I spoke to, who was ten years old at the time, ...

Reykjavik until 2008, when the institute was restructured by the Icelandic government. At that point, anothe ...