CHAPTER 21 LIFE GOES ON

“The fate of nearly all living organisms . . .” Schopf, p. 72.

“Only about 15 percent of rocks can preserve fossils . . .” Lewis, The Dating Game, p. 24.

“less than one species in ten thousand . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 280.

“there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 45.

“About 95 percent of all the fossils we possess . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 45.

“It seems like a big number . . .” Richard Fortey, interview by author, Natural History Museum, London, February 19, 2001.

“one-half of 1 percent as long.” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 24.

“a whole Profallotaspis or Elenellus as big as a crab . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 121.

“built up a collection of sufficient distinction . . .” “From Farmer-Laborer to Famous Leader: Charles D. Walcott (1850-1927),” GSA Today, January 1996.

“In 1879 he took a job as a field researcher . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, pp. 242-43.

“His books fill a library shelf . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 53.

“our sole vista upon the inception of modern life . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 56.

“Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 71.

“140 species in all, by one count.” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 27.

“a range of disparity . . . never again equaled . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 208.

“Under such an interpretation,’ Gould sighed . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 225.

“Then in 1973 a graduate student from Cambridge . . .”National Geographic, “Explosion of Life,” October 1993, p. 126.

“There was so much unrecognized novelty . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 123.

“they all use architecture first created . . .”U.S. News and World Report, “How Do Genes Switch On?” August 18/25, 1997, p. 74.

“at least fifteen and perhaps as many as twenty . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 25.

“Wind back the tape of life . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 14.

“In 1946 Sprigg was a young assistant government geologist . . .” Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p. 287.

“it failed to find favor with the association’s head . . .” Corfield, p. 287.

“Nine years later, in 1957 . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 85.

“There is nothing closely similar alive today . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 88.

“They are difficult to interpret . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 125.

“If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!” Dawkins review, Sunday Telegraph, February 25, 1990.

“One, writing in the New York Times Book Review . . .”New York Times Book Review, “Survival of the Luckiest,” October 22, 1989.

“Dawkins attacked Gould’s assertions . . .” Review of Full House in Evolution, June 1997.

“startled many in the paleontological community . . .”New York Times Book Review, “Rock of Ages,” May 10, 1998, p. 15.

“I have never encountered such spleen in a book by a professional . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 138.

“the idea of comparing a shrew and an elephant.” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 132.

“None was as strange as a present day barnacle . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 111.

“no less interesting, or odd, just more explicable.” Fortey, “Shock Lobsters,” London Review of Books, October 1, 1998.

“to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 137.

CHAPTER 22 GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

“In areas of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 48.

“Spontaneously, inorganic stone becomes living plant!” Marshall, Mosses and Lichens, p. 22.

“more than twenty thousand species of lichens.” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 214.

“Those the size of dinner plates . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 42.

“compressed into a normal earthly day . . .” Adapted from Schopf, p. 13.

“stretch your arms to their fullest extent . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 126.

“Oxygen levels . . . were as high as 35 percent . . .” Officer and Page, p. 123.

“the isotopes accumulate at different rates . . .” Officer and Page, p. 118.

“put them in wind tunnels to see how they do it . . .” Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p. 84.

“dragonflies grew as big as ravens.” Fortey, Life, p. 201.

“Luckily the team found just such a creature . . .” BBC Horizon, “The Missing Link,” first aired February 1, 2001.

“The names simply refer to the number and location of holes . . .” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 411.

“as high as 4,000 billion.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 9.

“To a first approximation . . . all species are extinct.” Quoted by Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 46.

“the average lifespan of a species . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 38.

“The alternative to extinction is stagnation . . .” Ian Tattersall, interviewed at American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.

“invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterward . . .” Stanley, p. 95; and Stevens, p. 12.

“In the Permian, at least 95 percent of animals . . .”Harper’s, “Planet of Weeds,” October 1998, p. 58.

“Even about a third of insect species . . .” Stevens, p. 12.

“It was, truly, a mass extinction . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 235.

“Estimates for the number of animal species alive . . .” Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, p. 340.

“For individuals the death toll could be much higher . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 143.

“Grazing animals, including horses, were nearly wiped out . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 100.

“At least two dozen potential culprits . . .”Earth, “The Mystery of Selective Extinctions,” October 1996, p. 12.

“tons of conjecture and very little evidence. . . .”New Scientist, “Meltdown,” August 7, 1999.

“Such an outburst is not easily imagined . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 19.

“The KT meteor had the additional advantage . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 17.

“Why should these delicate creatures . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 43.

“In the seas it was much the same story.” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 304.

“Somehow it does not seem satisfying . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 292.

“could well be known as the Age of Turtles.” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 39.

“Evolution may abhor a vacuum . . .” Stanley, p. 92.

“For perhaps as many as ten million years . . .” Novacek, Time Traveler, p. 112.

“guinea pigs the size of rhinos . . .” Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 102.

“a gigantic, flightless, carnivorous bird . . .” Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p. 138.

“built in 1903 in Pittsburgh . . .” Colbert, p. 164.