The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

they discovered, has no resident mammals, unless you count the scientists themselves or a pig tha ...

Graham brought me to see the photovoltaic panels that provide the research station with power, and the tanks ...

struck again by the extraordinary stars and the lightless horizon. I also felt, as I had several times at ...

tissue. The bundles were pink and resembled glass beads. Acropora millepora in the process of spawning. The he ...

of corals.” Later that night, some of the other researchers at Heron Island, including the graduate ...

CHAPTER VIII THE FOREST AND THE TREES Alzatea verticillata “Trees are stunning,” Miles Silman was saying. ...

worth of coca leaves that Silman had bought for the equivalent of about two dollars. Standing on the mountaint ...

Silman’s plots are arranged along a ridge. Plot 1, at the top of the ridge, has the highest elevation and ...

direction to move in, you have to go south, but you have 360 meridians to choose from. Perhaps, like m ...

Although the seventy-third meridian misses Central America altogether, it’s worth noting that tiny Belize, ...

but related theory has it that higher temperatures in and of themselves lead to higher mutation rates.) A s ...

Silman was carrying a two-foot-long machete, which he used to hack away at the undergrowth. Occasionall ...

ferns and orchids and bromeliads and strung with lianas. In some spots, the vegetation was so thick that soil ...

lighter. It also staved off hunger, alleviated aches and pains, and helped counter altitude sickness. I had b ...

added or subtracted. There were long, Talmudic discussions, conducted partly in English and partly in Spanis ...

in Plot 1, which is only about twenty-five hundred feet higher. Silman first laid out the plots in 2003 ...

genus includes Ilex aquifolium, which is native to Europe and known to Americans as Christmas holly.) T ...

Hemisphere, only to melt away again some hundred thousand years later. Even after the idea of ice a ...

more temperate regions. Darwin’s account has since been confirmed by all sorts of physical traces. Researcher ...

The first night on the trail, one of Silman’s students, Rudi Cruz, insisted that we all go out l ...