Inheritors of the Earth Quotes

“Foreign species are acting like any other species: a few have major impacts, but most don’t. Because a large majority of them have such limited impacts, the importation of lots of new species almost always increases the numbers of species in any given location, just as we saw in the forests and waters of Lake Maggiore. When lots of new arrivals establish breeding populations, hardly any ‘natives’ die out as a consequence.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Distant parts of the same continent can also be connected, isolated and then connected again. Asia and Europe form a single landmass, Eurasia, but the oak trees and beech trees that grow in eastern Asia and in Europe are not the same as one another. A single species of beech tree forms cathedral-like forests carpeted in golden autumnal leaves in Europe, but different beech species grow in China and elsewhere in eastern Asia, some with trunks that soar towards the canopy, while others branch close to the ground and jostle for space with bamboo thickets on mountain slopes. The climate of central Asia is too harsh, and these trees survive best in the more moderate oceanic regions that exist towards each end of the Eurasian landmass. Isolated, they have become separate species. European oaks also differ from those in eastern Asia, as though the two regions were giant islands separated by the frigid aridity of the continent’s centre. North American beeches and oaks differ again from those in Europe and Asia. Perhaps 55 million years ago, a new kind of tree evolved: the first oak. It originated, spread, colonized different continents, evolved into different species in different regions and climates, and at least some of them came back together again; acting like a giant, slow-acting global archipelago.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Jens-Christian Svenning, a tall, crazy-golf-playing scientist from Aarhus University in Denmark, worked out that as many as thirty-one genera of trees that were native to Europe between 5.3 and 2.6 million years ago have since become extinct, whereas thirty-five have survived in the region. If you had taken a grand tour of Europe 3 million years ago, you would have encountered double the diversity of native trees.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“This is not a one-off. Over 375 species of New World rats and mice evolved after they colonized South America, and rodents have evolved into over 130 species in Australia and New Guinea just a few million years after their first ancestors (presumably) rafted over on floating vegetation from Indonesia. And about eighty species of lupin plants evolved in the Andes in the last one and a half million years, after they invaded from North America. It would take only a modest 5 per cent of the world’s species to repeat the white-eye, rodent and lupin’s feats (say, generating twenty new species in different geographic locations in a million years) to double the total number of species on our planet.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“So, we are still at plus two species: Oxford ragwort and Yorkwort. And it did not stop there: Oxford ragwort’s tour of Britain has been extensive, hybridizing with common groundsel elsewhere, often spawning a plant called Senecio baxteri. Because thirty-chromosome baxteri is sterile, that doesn’t count as a new species. However, a few individual baxteri plants must, by chance, have experienced a developmental ‘error’ somewhere in North Wales, and a fertile sixty-chromosome version was born. Hence Senecio cambrensis, Welsh groundsel, arrived on the scene4–speciation in an instant. Species number three. The same thing happened in Edinburgh, but they were very like cambrensis and died out again, so perhaps we should not add the Edinburgh hybrids to the credits.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“With this increased diversity at the base of the food chain, there are increased opportunities for insects and fungi and bacteria that did not initially accompany the plants to spread around the world.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“New lineages of reef-diving mammal might be born.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction