Ammonites,” Geobios 54 (2012): 87–98.
“Basically, if you were a triceratops”: Personal communication, Steve D’Hondt, Jan. 5, 2012.
Birds were also hard-hit: Nicholas R. Longrich, T. Tokaryk, and D. J. Field, “Mass Extinction
of Birds at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) Boundary,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 108 (2011): 15253–257.
The same goes for lizards: Nicholas R. Longrich, Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar, and Jacques A.
Gauthier, “Mass Extinction of Lizards and Snakes at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 21396–401.
Mammals’ ranks, too, were devastated: Kenneth Rose, The Beginning of the Age of Mammals
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 2.
“the rules of the survival game”: Paul D. Taylor, Extinctions in the History of Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.
CHAPTER V: WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE
Others were completely flummoxed: Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman, “On the Perception
of Incongruity: A Paradigm,” Journal of Personality 18 (1949): 206–23. I am indebted to James Gleick
for drawing my attention to this experiment: see Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking,
1987), 35.
“In science, as in the playing card experiment”: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 64.
“God knows how many catastrophes”: Quoted in Patrick John Boylan, “William Buckland,
1784–1859: Scientific Institutions, Vertebrate Paleontology and Quaternary Geology” (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Leicester, England, 1984), 468.
“as explosive for science”: William Glen, Mass Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 2.
Something like eighty-five percent: Hallam and Wignall, Mass Exinctions and Their Aftermath,
4.
“Had the list of survivors”: Richard A. Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion
Years of Life on Earth (New York: Vintage, 1999), 135.
The two paleontologists: David M. Raup and J. John Sepkoski Jr., “Periodicity of Extinctions
in the Geologic Past,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 81 (1984): 801–5.
everything but sex and the royal family: Raup, The Nemesis Affair, 19.
another disapproving editorial: New York Times Editorial Board, “Nemesis of Nemesis,” New
York Times, July 7, 1985.
“We felt sure that there would be”: Luis W. Alvarez, “Experimental Evidence That an
Asteroid Impact Led to the Extinction of Many Species 65 Million Years Ago,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 80 (1983): 633.
One theory has it: Timothy M. Lenton et al., “First Plants Cooled the Ordovician,” Nature
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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