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April 15 - April 26, 2019
Georges Cuvier.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
“Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? A View from the World of Amphibians.”
“have been five great mass extinctions during the history of life on this planet.” These extinctions they described as events that led to “a profound loss of biodiversity.”
to as “the mother of mass extinctions” or “the great dying.”) The most recent—and famous—mass extinction came at the close of the Cretaceous period; it wiped out, in addition to the dinosaurs, the plesiosaurs, the mosasaurs, the ammonites, and the pterosaurs.
Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare.
Atelopus zeteki.
Noachian
The ancestors of today’s frogs crawled out of the water some 400 million years ago, and by 250 million years ago the earliest representatives
and it will all be as it once was,
“background extinction.”
extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what’s known as the background extinction rate.
define mass extinctions as events that eliminate a “significant proportion of the world’s biota in a geologically insignificant amount of time.”
whole groups of once-dominant organisms can disappear or be relegated to secondary roles,
usual rules of survival are suspended.
Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.
African clawed frogs,
This sort of intercontinental reshuffling, which nowadays we find totally unremarkable, is probably unprecedented in the three-and-a-half-billion-year history of life.
Alexander Pope
All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
Carl Linnaeus
Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier,
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,
“Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”
espèces perdues,
“All these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours,”
“But what was this primitive earth? And what revolution was able to wipe it out?”
proboscideans, the group that includes elephants and their lost cousins—mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres,
About thirty million years ago, the proboscidean line that would lead to mastodons split off from the line that would lead to mammoths and elephants.
“I should say that I have been supported with the most ardent enthusiasm … by all Frenchmen and foreigners who cultivate or love the sciences,
“If so many lost species have been restored in so little time, how many must be supposed to exist still in the depths of the earth?”
Homo diluvii testis, or “man who was witness to the Flood.
He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning “wing-fingered.”
Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes.
transformisme
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
“Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events,” he wrote. “Living organisms without number have been the victims of these catastrophes.”
“The thread of operations is broken,”
“revolutions on the surface of the earth.”
megafauna extinction.
the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.
Charles Lyell.
“The present is the key to the past.”
Charles Darwin.
One of Lyell’s central claims was that some areas of the earth were gradually rising, just as others were gradually subsiding.
“One second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection could never create,”
“most awful yet interesting spectacle”
“I have always thought that the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind,”
Darwin saw that the key to understanding coral reefs was the interplay between biology and geology.
“Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin.”
