And it wasn’t just mammoths. Before long hundreds of other strange-looking fossils began to be identified as creatures that had mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. The claim that some animals that had once lived had gone extinct raised uncomfortable questions. If every creature in God’s fixed universe had a place and a purpose, why had some died off? Michael Mosley, The Power of Science: Power, Proof & Passion, BBC 2010
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience
The twentieth century, according to Sigmund Freud, would see man’s capacity for both destruction and technology bring us closer to extinction. As his prophecy came close to reality a new breed of thinker emerged who would try to steer humanity away from disaster. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3: Human, All Too Human, BBC 2011
51,487. In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall-grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheat-fields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were captured and imprisoned in the Los Angeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction effort has since been started.) Except in northern Minnesota and northwestern Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Four percent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other 'varmints'. Dams choke most of the continent’s rivers and streams. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, Ecodefense: A Field Guide To Monkeywrenching
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away – all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
Why – 50 million years ago – did they all die out? There’s not one surviving ammonite today. David Attenborough, Life on Earth II: Building Bodies, BBC 1979
A meteor impact that sent shockwaves around the world ... 65 million years ago they [dinosaurs] disappeared from the fossil record. David Attenborough’s Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates: Dawn of the Mammals, BBC 2013
I actually witnessed the extinction in the wild of the Panamanian Golden Frog which fell victim to the same insidious killer. Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild III: Our Fragile Planet, BBC 2012
But the Census has also given us a glimpse of the future in which many species and habitats could end up disappearing, some before we’ve even had the chance to discover them. David Attenborough, Horizon: The Death of our Oceans? BBC 2010
What happened to them all? 66 million years ago an asteroid hit the Earth, and scientists think it was this collision that wiped out the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough, BBC 2022
If one small and odd lineage of fishes had not evolved fins capable of bearing weight on land (though evolved for different reasons in lakes and seas,) terrestrial vertebrates would never have arisen. If a large extra-terrestrial object – the ultimate random bolt from the blue – had not triggered the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals would still be small creatures, confined to the nooks and crannies of a dinosaur’s world, and incapable of evolving the larger size that brains big enough for self-consciousness require. If a small and tenuous population of proto-humans had not survived a hundred slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and potential extinction) on the savannas of Africa, then Homo sapiens would never have emerged to spread throughout the globe. We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. Stephen Jay Gould
During the rest of his voyage Darwin would encounter a vast variety of plants and animal species he’d never seen before. He’d discover fossils of giant extinct species that seemed to resemble the living animals around him. And in the Galapagos he’d encounter different species of birds and tortoises uniquely adapted to the conditions on each of the islands. Everywhere he looked he seemed to find evidence that Life on Earth was constantly changing. Andrew Marr, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, BBC 2009
Myers was now suggesting that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, and this one is being caused by us. Norman Myers estimated that this new mass extinction was the fastest loss of species ever seen on the planet, and the greatest number of casualties was from tropical rain forests. ibid.
But remember that up until recently people refused to believe in the Mountain Gorilla, the Okapi, the Komodo Dragon. They were all discovered in this century [20th]. Even the Panda is a new arrival ... Who would have believed the current stories of a sabre-toothed killer loose even now in the Australian bush if we didn’t have evidence on film that the ferocious Tasmanian tiger – this is the last one known - was still alive in Hobart Zoo in 1933. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World
The Permian Extinction: in which 95% of the species in the oceans died, and about 80% of those on land. Kim Stanley Robinson, author Sixty Days and Counting
Some scientists believe these periods of death and destruction happen like clockwork. The Universe s2e11: Unexplained Mysteries, History 2007
Little geological evidence remains of the Permian-Triassic extinction. ibid.
The apocalyptic event has been called the K-T Extinction, because of a thin band of geological signatures dating to that time all over the world, known as the Cretaceous Tertiary, or K-T boundary. It separates the age of reptiles and the age of mammals. Dinosaur bones are not found above the K-T boundary. The Universe s2e12: Cosmic Collisions
In the 1990s a Mexican oil company found the smoking gun. While drilling off the Yucatan peninsula they discovered a hundred-mile-wide impact crater buried under water beneath three thousand feet of limestone. Analysis of the rock confirmed the crater had been formed by an asteroid. ibid.
Life on our planet has suffered a series of devastating mass extinction events. These have killed off uncountable species, and even threatened to end life on Earth altogether. Survivors: Nature's Indestructible Creatures I: The Great Dying, Professor Richard Fortey, BBC 2012
Is being a survivor a question of having some very special features or nothing more than pure chance? ibid.
We are all the sons and daughters of catastrophe. ibid.
The Greatest Extinction Event in the history of our planet: 250 million years ago. ibid.
Then one day sixty-five million years ago this world came to a sudden end when a ten-kilometre diameter asteroid collided with the Earth. Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures II: Fugitive from the Fire
Big brains would prove to be key to the evolution and success of mammals. ibid.
2.8 million years ago, triggered by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun and shifts in its ocean currents, our world began to cool. Survivors: Nature's Indestructible Creatures III: Frozen in Time
One way to cope with the onset of freezing conditions is to go large. ibid.
Another was to get woolly. ibid.
Every survivor we have seen is just one small part of a vast and interconnected tree of life. ibid.
A new era of man-made mass extinction. ibid.