It is not mentioned: Many, but not all, of Darwin’s letters are available to the public online;
Elizabeth Smith of the Darwin Correspondence Project kindly performed a search of the entire
database.
On this basis, Lawson claimed: Thalia K. Grant and Gregory B. Estes, Darwin in Galápagos:
Footsteps to a New World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 123.
In fact, it probably disappeared: Ibid., 122.
“the denial of humanity’s special status”: David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An
Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (New York: Atlas
Books/Norton, 2006), 209.
CHAPTER IV: THE LUCK OF THE AMMONITES
“In science, sometimes it’s better”: Walter Alvarez, “Earth History in the Broadest Possible
Context,” Ninety-Seventh Annual Faculty Research Lecture, University of California, Berkeley,
International House, delivered Apr. 29, 2010.
“hard-core uniformitarianism”: Walter Alvarez, T. rex and the Crater of Doom (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 139.
The amount of iridium: Ibid., 69.
“like a shark smelling blood”: Richard Muller, Nemesis (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1988), 51.
“to connect the dinosaurs”: Quoted in Charles Officer and Jake Page, “The K-T Extinction,”
in Language of the Earth: A Literary Anthology, 2nd ed., edited by Frank H. T. Rhodes, Richard O. Stone,
and Bruce D. Malamud (Chichester, England: Wiley, 2009), 183.
“The Cretaceous extinctions were gradual”: Quoted in Malcolm W. Browne, “Dinosaur
Experts Resist Meteor Extinction Idea,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1985.
“Astronomers should leave”: New York Times Editorial Board, “Miscasting the Dinosaur’s
Horoscope,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1985.
he noted a “chasm”: Lyell, Principles of Geology, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 328.
Rudists have been described: David M. Raup, The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs
and the Ways of Science (New York: Norton, 1986), 58.
“I look at the natural geological record”: Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 310–11.
“So profound is our ignorance”: Ibid., 73.
“a long and essentially continuous process”: George Gaylord Simpson, Why and How: Some
Problems and Methods in Historical Biology (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980), 35.
“codswallop”: Quoted in Browne, “Dinosaur Experts Resist Meteor Extinction Idea.”
In 1984, grains of shocked quartz: B. F. Bohor et al., “Mineralogic Evidence for an Impact
Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary,” Science 224 (1984): 867–69.
In a drawing that accompanies: Neil Landman et al., “Mode of Life and Habitat of Scaphitid
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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