Quotes & Sayings About Extinct Species

If human culture continues on its present course and allows ten to one hundred species to go extinct every day,22 not only do we lose the beauty achieved by the individuals that perish, but, by weakening the harmony of the whole, we diminish the depth of intensity possible for every individual within that system. — Brian Henning

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. — Richard E. Leakey

The question now at issue, whether the living species are connected with the extinct by a common bond of descent, will best be cleared up by devoting ourselves to the study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time. — Charles Lyell

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion). — Yuval Noah Harari

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form
or a species
will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap. — Eckhart Tolle

Over 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. — Neil Shubin

It was the uniform of a time and place, of a nearly extinct species - the belligerent middle-American redneck who had fought in Korea, come back with his faith unshaken, and then watched the 1960s unfold the way he might watch his house burn down. There had never been any Summer of Love for Arthur Schuler. He had no interest in Civil Rights, hippies or liberals - or Democrats for that matter. I heard him say once that it might have worked out very well if we had indeed brought all the planes back from Vietnam, just in time to napalm the Woodstock festival. But the man had lived. He had been an orphan of the Great Depression and seen the country and the world. He had made his way, been a barroom fighter and - he hinted - a womanizer at some distant point in the twentieth century, and had come away with an instinct for life, for the things that people do and their base and predictable motivations. We — Matthew Louis

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large-headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing 100 pounds or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens? — Yuval Noah Harari

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, 'I wonder where we're headed.' — Louise Leakey

I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God's creation, to drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can't bring them back. — Stuart L. Pimm

Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders. — Richard Preston

The eyes of that species of extinct giant, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara as our eyes do now. — Abraham Lincoln

Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction. — George Gaylord Simpson

Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct. — Gaylord Nelson

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom. — Quammen, David

It's like Dungeons and Dragons, but real."
Jace was looking at Simon as if he were some bizarre species of insect. "It's like what?"
"It's a game," Clary explained. She felt vaguely embarrassed. "People pretend to be wizards and elves, and they kill monsters and stuff."
Jace looked stupefied.
Simon grinned. "you've never hear of Dungeon and Dragons?"
"I've heard of dungeons," Jace said. "Also dragons. Although they're mostly extinct."
Simon looked disappointed. "You've never killed a dragon?"
"He's probably never met a six-foot-tall hot elf-woman in a fur bikini, either," Clary said irritably. "Lay off, Simon."
"Real elves are about eight inches tall," Jace pointed out. "Also, they bite. — Cassandra Clare

Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him. — Nicole Krauss

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most. — Charles Darwin

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct. — Charles Darwin

There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth's net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world's human population now doubling every forty-one years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world's fixed pie of resources. In addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world's species will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our own life support. — Jared Diamond

A language, like a species, when extinct, never ... reappears. — Charles Darwin

If they [enlightened men] take any interest in examining, in the infancy of our species, the almost obliterated traces of so many nations that have become extinct, they will doubtless take a similar interest in collecting, amidst the darkness which covers the infancy of the globe, the traces of those revolutions which took place anterior to the existence of all nations. — Georges Cuvier

Hypothesis The science Mermaids are related to aliens from outer space who settled areas of Earth deep under the ocean and eventually mated with fish. This hypothesis is "out there." No evidence exists to support it. Creatures that closely resembled mermaids once existed but are now extinct or rare. For instance, a now-extinct species of sea cows might have been mistaken for mermaids. If true, this hypothesis would only prove the existence of a different type of sea cow, not mermaids. Plus, it would not explain recent mermaid sightings. Mermaids once existed but are now extinct. No "mermaid" fossils have yet been found. Mermaid — Lori Hile

We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to emulate or avoid in ourselves. Any major change in our relationships with animals, individual or collective, reverberates profoundly in our character as human beings, in ways that go far beyond immediately pragmatic concerns. When a species becomes extinct, something perishes in the human soul as well. — Boria Sax

Later, I learned that our forgetting of the parakeet had begun even before the species was extinct. — Christopher Cokinos

People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today. — Betty White

That's the way to get young people. Once they see there are wonderful things to hunt for, to rediscover a species that was thought to be extinct or is extremely rare, to be the first to see a nest, to discover a new species unsuspected close to your home - these are things, I think, with a little education and excitement and the right kind of natural history would actually start a movement that makes going back to nature a profitable adventure. — E. O. Wilson

For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century ... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year. — Douglas Adams

We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before. — Carl Sagan

That I had never heard of such a bird did not surprise me ... But others more experienced also did not know of the Carolina Parakeet. The more I spoke of the bird, the more it seemed that, somehow, its existence had been a chimera. Admittedly, my survey was small and unscientific, but intelligent people who could reel off the names of various dinosaurs and identify sparrows at epic distances could not name the forgotten parakeet. I realized, forcefully, what I suppose I knew abstractly: Histories, like species, can go extinct. — Christopher Cokinos

Ninety-five percent of all the species that have ever existed are now extinct, so don't look so goddamn smug. - GERARD RYDER — Christopher Moore

Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on - up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely "animal" life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn. — H.G.Wells

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different! — Anthony Doerr

The human race has the capacity to render itself extinct unless alternatives are found to the patterns of intraspecific warfare that have dominated civilized history. Ours has long been a predatory species. Living, for humans, depends upon the ability to kill as clearly as it does for lions or wolves. But lions and wolves, like almost all predatory species, normally limit their killing to prey animals, and they are equipped with elaborate ritual precautions to prevent the destruction of their own kind. Humans appear to be unique among predators in their enthusiasm to destroy members of their own species. Perhaps this unusual behavior can be attributed to some genetic deficiency which may lead humans ultimately to join the rest of nature's failures in the biological graveyard of extinction. Or perhaps our willingness to kill ourselves, like so many of our other problems, is something we have devised by misusing our enlarged brains. — Joseph W. Meeker

Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening? — Rick Bass

Species that struggle to adapt to survive will become extinct — Charles Darwin

They may not become extinct immediately, but being pushed out of decaying or destroyed habitats eventually takes its toll. The concept is known as extinction debt, the delay between the stress on species and the final dwindling of the last survivors until the organisms disappear and are never seen again. — Craig Childs

I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that natural selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification. — Charles Darwin

Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means that led to everything else, whether you're blessed or cursed or both. Trace it back far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The patterns of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers. — Rebecca Solnit

One animal or plant species may become extinct every hour. All species are doomed to extinction, but man through worldwide development/killing animals for food/profit/using toxic chemicals such as pesticides/industrial wastes, will accelerate the extinction of plants/animals and the result will be a more hostile environment for man. — Erik P. Eckholm

The Tree of Life was an ancient symbol of interconnection, fertility, and eternal life - precisely because of this legendary tree's fruit. Fruit is part of our essence, a basic element of who we are. We cannot survive without fruit on this planet. It outweighs the nutrition of any other food. Yet the current "health" movement toward low-carb diets has put fruit on the endangered species list, with the goal of making it extinct. Is this denial? Ignorance? Foolishness? We're not talking about uneducated people who are driving the trend. We're talking about smart, highly intelligent professionals with advanced degrees in medicine and nutrition. If they're advising patients to shun fruit, it must be because of their training, the misinformation out there, or their own selective interests. Have you heard of book burning? If the anti-sugar war keeps up its momentum, fruit trees will be next to go up in flames. — Anthony William

One must believe that every living thing whatsoever must change insensibly in its organization and in its form ... One must therefore never expect to find among living species all those which are found in the fossil state, and yet one may not assume that any species has really been lost or rendered extinct. — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

This is the moment when we have to decide: does a world exist outside ourselves and is that world worth fighting for? Another 200 species went extinct today. They were my kin. They were yours, too. If we know them as such, why aren't we fighting to save them with everything we've got? — Lierre Keith

all humans have an innate capacity to heal from traumatic experiences. We as a species are genetically encoded with the capacity to heal ourselves. If we did not possess this ability, our species would have become extinct shortly after we were born. Not only can we heal from traumatic experiences, but trauma itself has been part of the natural evolutionary process of our species, and all traumatized individuals have access to this natural healing method that is genetically encoded within them. — David Berceli

Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct. — Bill Bryson

Humans, after all, weren't actively hostile toward most of the species we'd made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren't part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all. — Mark O'Connell

There's money to be made by driving a species extinct. — Paul Watson

In moments of peace such as I experienced that day with Edal there exists some unritual reunion with the rest of creation without which the lives of many are trivial. 'Extinct' applies as much to an essential mental attitude as to the vanished creatures of the earth such as the Dodo. We can no longer await some scientific revelation to avoid the destruction of our species in this context; the evidence is all there, the writing on the wall. The way back cannot be the same for all of us, but for those like myself it means a descent of the rungs until we stand again amid the other creatures of the earth and share to some small extent their vision of it, even though this may be labelled Wordsworthian romanticism. — Gavin Maxwell

I think when you work on fossils, and you realize that a species is there, and it's abundant for quite a long period of time, and then at some point it's no longer there - and so, when you look at that bigger picture, yes, you realize that either you change and adapt, or, as a species, you go extinct. — Louise Leakey

Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And — Kim Stanley Robinson

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design. — Kevin Kelly

Species went extinct and new ones evolved from protozoa while he sat in his car in the dark and waited to see how badly he'd fucked this up. — Amy Jo Cousins

Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring. — Carl Sagan

Every day on this planet some species that doesn't draw the attention of humans goes extinct. — Liu Cixin

It was titled "Helping a Species Go Extinct. — Elizabeth Kolbert

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became extinct before man set eyes on them. — Sigmund Freud

Having studied biology really helped me a lot because I quickly understand how biological systems work, and how they fail, and the tragedy of when they fail, because we are dealing with life systems, and when we hear that a species has become extinct, or is threatened, you realize that this could mean that this species will disappear from the face of the earth forever! So that understanding really gives you energy to do something to save it. — Wangari Maathai

I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct
if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of an extinct species of fineboned insectoid creatures. all of these bones, then, seemed to have been stained by sun and earth from an original living white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been. Howard wondered about a man who had never seen summer, a winter man, examining the weeds and making this inference
that he was looking at an ossuary. the man would take that as true and base his ideas of the world on that mistake. — Paul Harding

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? — Peter Benchley

There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Now, scientists could reconstitute many more species by replacing the DNA of closely related creatures with DNA from extinct species. — Anonymous

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now? — J.G. Ballard

For human beings. We almost went extinct fighting one another before. Now our numbers are even fewer. Our conditions more tenuous. Is this really what we want to do? Kill ourselves off completely? In the hopes that - what? Some decent species will inherit the smoking remains of the earth?" "I — Suzanne Collins

Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world's population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out. — Christine Kenneally

'Extinction' issue. Save the species for whom??? Humans' convenience, of course! Individuals of the species are snatched from their homes/family/habitat/held in captivity/forced to mate at great physical/ spiritual pain. When the right numbers are reached, their holocaust starts all over again! Another merry-go-round/ bu$ine$$ a$ u$ual!!! Protectionists/welfarists find it a profitable issue: no controversy/ easy donations! I'd rather see an entire species extinct than in the hands of the humans! — Adela Popescu

Buddhism: a violent religion that has compensated for the exploding human population by causing whole species of animal vessels to go extinct. — Bauvard

There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel's laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type. — Julius Evola

There's a humpback whale in the ocean that sings at fifty-two hertz: too low for any other whale to hear. Scientists aren't sure if it's a genetic anomaly, or a sole survivor of an extinct species, or just a whale who accidentally learnt the wrong song. They just know that it's probably the loneliest mammal on earth. — Holly Smale

Humanity must work together to stop deforestation. Every minute over 160 acres of land feel the destructive effects of deforestation. Deforestation causes species to become extinct, disrupts natural habitats, and erodes the top soil of viable farming lands causing drought and famine. — Kambiz Mostofizadeh

There is no good scientific reason to bring back an extinct species. Why would one bring them back? To put them in a theme park? — Hendrik Poinar

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. — Carlo Rovelli

An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand ... — Nicole Krauss

What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite. — Louise Leakey

Let's not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. A great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth. — Will Cuppy

If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on. — Elizabeth Kolbert

There's a voice that says: "So what?"
It's not my voice, it's probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn't he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity?" And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire? — David Quammen

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Vampire females are as good as extinct."
Thad was aghast. "No females?"
Natalya patted his shoulder. "You can date other species, Tiger. Don't you worry. I've already thought of some ladies to relieve you of your big V. One's a nymph - "
"Over my dead body," Regin said. "Two-bit hookers, every one of them."
Thad scratched his head. "Mr. Lothaire said every male needed a purring nymph or two chained to the foot of his
bed. As pets."
Natalya gasped. "All right, lad, no more talking to Lothaire. — Kresley Cole

Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct. The last remains of Homo soloensis are dated to about 50,000 years ago. Homo denisova disappeared shortly thereafter. Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The last dwarf-like humans vanished from Flores Island about 12,000 years ago. They left behind some bones, stone tools, a few genes in our DNA and a lot of unanswered questions. They also left behind us, Homo sapiens, the last human species. — Yuval Noah Harari

From her own life experience Keldaren knew that loveable hunks were in short supply anywhere in the galaxy, loveable hunks who knew her were an extinct species, and that more marketing companies than friends had her phone number. — L.L. Watkin

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time. — P.D. James

If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time. — Barbara Kingsolver

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. — Yuval Noah Harari

Several times in Earth's history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. — James Hansen

It had long been accepted that if a species put mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be extinct before long. — Dan Simmons

We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For — Carlo Rovelli

Two and a half million years ago, when our distant relative Homo habilis was foraging for food across the Tanzanian savannah, a beam of light left the Andromeda Galaxy and began its journey across the Universe. As that light beam raced across space at the speed of light, generations of pre-humans and humans lived and died; whole species evolved and became extinct, until one member of that unbroken lineage, me, happened to gaze up into the sky below the constellation we call Cassiopeia and focus that beam of light onto his retina. A two-and-a-half-billion-year journey ends by creating an electrical impulse in a nerve fibre, triggering a cascade of wonder in a complex organ called the human brain that didn't exist anywhere in the Universe when the journey began. — Brian Cox

The Maoris, New Zealand's first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species. — Yuval Noah Harari