The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Frogs,” PLOS ONE 8 (2013).
Darwin presented them to Lyell: David Dobbs, Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz,
and the Meaning of Coral (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 152.
Lyell “recognized that Darwin”: Rudwick, Worlds before Adam, 491.
“Without Lyell”: Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York: Knopf, 1995), 186.
“a single pair”: Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 124.
“exactly the kind of miracle”: Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution,
and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 407.
“It may be said that”: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 84.
“The appearance of new forms”: Ibid., 320.
“The theory of natural selection”: Ibid., 320.
“The complete extinction of the species”: Ibid., 318.
Icelandair provided: Errol Fuller, The Great Auk (New York: Abrams, 1999), 197.
genetic analysis has shown: Truls Moum et al., “Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Evolution and
Phylogeny of the Atlantic Alcidae, Including the Extinct Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis),”
Molecular Biology and Evolution 19 (2002): 1434–39.
the birds’ “astonishing velocity”: Jeremy Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk? (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 8.
great auk bones have been found: Ibid., 9.
“They are always in the water”: Quoted in Fuller, The Great Auk, 64.
“by hundreds at a time”: Quoted in Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk?, 87.
“the great auks of Funk Island”: Fuller, The Great Auk, 64.
“You take a kettle”: Quoted in ibid., 65–66.
It’s been estimated: Tim Birkhead, “How Collectors Killed the Great Auk,” New Scientist 142
(1994): 26.
“The destruction which they have made”: Quoted in Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk?, 109.
“rare and accidental”: Quoted in ibid., 37. Gaskell also points out the contradiction in
Audubon’s description.
Subsequent detective work: Fuller, The Great Auk, 228–29.
“It was with heavy hearts”: Alfred Newton, “Abstract of Mr. J. Wolley’s Researches in
Iceland Respecting the Gare-Fowl or Great Auk,” Ibis 3 (1861): 394.
“peculiar attraction”: Alexander F. R. Wollaston, Life of Alfred Newton (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1921), 52.
“It came to me like the direct revelation”: Quoted in ibid., 112.
“pure and unmitigated Darwinism”: Quoted in ibid., 121.