Amanda

“Chickens—lowly chickens!—have a rhodopsin for low-light conditions, four color-sensing pigments, and a pigment in their pineal glands (uninventively called pinopsin) that uses light to help set their circadian rhythm. That’s quite a bit of color, but chickens aren’t so lowly, really. They’re the evolutionary offspring of dinosaurs, after all.”
― Adam Rogers, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern

“For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“The question of when life begins is answered according to the purposes for which we ask it.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey