The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

to be confused with “catastrophes.” The same year that the Alvarezes published their paper in Science, ...

leaving behind a distinctive fingerprint in the sedimentary record. He scanned the records of thousand ...

The Chicxulub crater, off the Yucatán Peninsula, is buried under half a mile of sediment. “Those eleven years ...

Landman has his office in a turret overlooking Central Park, and, together with a pair of graduate student ...

iris. AMMONITES floated through the world’s shallow oceans for more than three hundred million years, and their foss ...

Ammonite fossils from a nineteenth-century engraving. “I remember when I was a kid taking paleontology, a ...

one of the arms pokes up out of the webbing to form the cephalopod version of a penis. Landman attended gradua ...

it moved and incinerating anything in its path. “Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you h ...

were Hesperornithine birds, which were aquatic and for the most part flightless. The same goes for lizards and ...

because its remains are rarer. This effect—known as the Signor-Lipps effect, after the scientists wh ...

“It was worth the trip just for that,” he exclaimed. It’s unclear what aspect of the impact—the heat, the d ...

raises a key point. Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow su ...

CHAPTER V WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE Dicranograptus ziczac In 1949, a pair of Harvard psychologists recru ...

“’My God!’ reaction.” This pattern was, Kuhn argued in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revo ...

catastrophes” would be needed, Lyell scoffed, poking fun at the whole endeavor. Lyell’s solution was to reject ...

There’s a view over a waterfall, which crashes down into a narrow valley. A few yards farther up the ...

radiation—though it remained, for the most part, still confined to the water. During the Ordovician, the numb ...

scratches or in some cases tiny petroglyphs. (The word “graptolite” comes from the Greek meaning “w ...

things around them.” This makes them useful index fossils—successive species can be used to identify succe ...

allow them to say, give or take half a million years or so, when each of the layers was formed. ...