Elizabeth Kolbert quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Elizabeth Kolbert on Wise Famous Quotes.

There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.

Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.

It was about three feet wide and stippled

Ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.

With the exception of humans, all the great apes today are facing oblivion.

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca

According to Lamarck, there was a force - the 'power of life' - that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Lyell became something of a celebrity - the Steven Pinker of his generation - and

By the end of this century, CO2 levels could reach a level not seen

The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.)

generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.

vaccinated every single condor - today there about four hundred

It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.

An amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually.

The 'incredible frog hotel' - really a local bed and breakfast - ... the frogs stay (in their tanks) in a block of rented rooms.

some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

This thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land.

stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species.

Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.

Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

If there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

and handjobs on crows.

Her ruddy brown skin had the texture of pebbled linoleum.

Suci, a Sumatran rhino, lives at the Cincinnati Zoo,

[On the birther movement:] Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.

The first view I got of Suci was her prodigious backside.

(One of Crutzen's fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife,

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

Creep, clobber, squawk. Repeat.

At the heart of Darwin's theory,

Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.

Most of us live in parts of the world where we don't expect to see much, and we wouldn't necessarily notice things that are crashing.

We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning 'wing-fingered.

No matter what Donald Trump says, it's clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet.

Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues.

Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed,

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species.

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct.

Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by fifty percent just in the last thirty years.

As with any young species, this one's position is precarious.

(Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)

is "the denial of humanity's special status.

A hundred years ago, in Africa, the population of black rhinos approached a million;

Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as "substantial biodiversity losses" that occur rapidly and are "global in extent.

Amphibians - the word comes from the Greek meaning 'double life.

Armadillos that, in some cases, grew to be as large as Fiat 500s.

A single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.

Once unloaded, everything has to be lugged through

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.

Durrant stopped off at a commissary of sorts to pick up a selection of his favorite snacks.

Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.

Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

By a pair of herpetologists. It was titled Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?

Parents want their kids' approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents' approval.

have become even more sought-after as a high-end party "drug"; at clubs in southeast Asia,

Number of chimpanzees in the wild has dropped to perhaps half of what it was fifty years ago,

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.)

(Rhino horns, which are made of keratin,

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES

The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.

Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.

higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years.

The birds do not like this camera," Sveinsson said. "So they fly over it and shit on it.

powdered horn is snorted like cocaine.)

we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes

Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans kill each other.

A webcam that Iceland's environmental agency had set up.

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.

I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.

On our way over to see the bird,

Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized is how one geologist put it to me.

at the time of my visit he still had failed to

It's owing to Roth and the handful of others like her who know

The windowless room where the po'ouli cells are kept alive - sort of - is called the Frozen Zoo.

within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.

(The desolate post-impact sea has been dubbed the "Strangelove ocean.")

How to perform an ultrasound with one arm up a rhino's rectum.

Roth pulled a second glove over the first and grabbed what looked like a video game remote.