The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

similar-colored flightless birds in the Southern Hemisphere, they used the same name, which led to much ...

through the air. And these birds are so fat it is marvellous. In less than half an hour we filled two b ...

been a large one to persist through more than two centuries of depredation. By the late ...

was “said to breed on a rock on that island,” a curious contradiction since no breeding bird can be ...

“Regulations,” he shrugged. Ármannsson had also brought along his fishing partner and a cooler fi ...

northern gannets—some thirty thousand pairs. He pointed out a pyramid-like structure atop the islan ...

supposed to go with them refused to on the grounds that it was too dangerous.) By this po ...

the experience of the trip would prove to be life-altering. He concluded that the auk was gone—“for ...

named Alfred Russel Wallace was onto a similar idea. (A paper by Wallace appeared in the same issue of ...

single one. Lawson predicted that Charles’s tortoise, known today by the scientific name Chelonoidis ele ...

the Charles Island tortoise or, to continue the list, the dodo or the Steller’s sea cow? These animals had ob ...

CHAPTER IV THE LUCK OF THE AMMONITES Discoscaphites jerseyensis The hill town of Gubbio, about a hundred mil ...

case, literal as much as figurative—had settled, some three-quarters of all species had been wiped out. The ...

WALTER Alvarez came from a long line of distinguished scientists. His great-grandfather and grandfather were ...

there was limestone with more forams, but these belonged to only a handful of species, all o ...

While Walter had been studying plate tectonics, Luis had won a Nobel Prize. He’d also developed the fi ...

At Stevns Klint, the end of the Cretaceous period shows up as a layer of clay that’s jet black and smells l ...

Sagan decided to try to model the effects of an all-out war and came up with the concept of “nuclear winter,” ...

Cenozoic are “eras,” and each era comprises several “periods”; the Mesozoic, for example, ...

gap, Lyell concluded that the unaccounted-for interval must have been a long one, roughly equivalent ...