The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert

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 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.