A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [256]
12 “our sole vista upon the inception of modern life . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 56.
13 “Gould, ever scrupulous, discovered . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 71.
14 “140 species in all, by one count.” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 27.
15 “a range of disparity . . . never again equaled . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 208.
16 “Under such an interpretation,' Gould sighed . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 225.
17 “Then in 1973 a graduate student from Cambridge . . .” National Geographic, “Explosion of Life,” October 1993, p. 126.
18 “There was so much unrecognized novelty . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 123.
19 “they all use architecture first created . . .” U.S. News and World Report, “How Do Genes Switch On?” August 18/25, 1997, p. 74.
20 “at least fifteen and perhaps as many as twenty . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 25.
21 “Wind back the tape of life . . .” Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 14.
22 “In 1946 Sprigg was a young assistant government geologist . . .” Corfield, Architects of Eternity, p. 287.
23 “it failed to find favor with the association's head . . .” Corfield, p. 287.
24 “Nine years later, in 1957 . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 85.
25 “There is nothing closely similar alive today . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 88.
26 “They are difficult to interpret . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 125.
27 “If only Stephen Gould could think as clearly as he writes!” Dawkins review, Sunday Telegraph, February 25, 1990.
28 “One, writing in the New York Times Book Review . . .” New York Times Book Review, “Survival of the Luckiest,” October 22, 1989.
29 “Dawkins attacked Gould's assertions . . .” Review of Full House in Evolution, June 1997.
30 “startled many in the paleontological community . . .” New York Times Book Review, “Rock of Ages,” May 10, 1998, p. 15.
31 “I have never encountered such spleen in a book by a professional . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 138.
32 “the idea of comparing a shrew and an elephant.” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 132.
33 “None was as strange as a present day barnacle . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 111.
34 “no less interesting, or odd, just more explicable.” Fortey, “Shock Lobsters,” London Review of Books, October 1, 1998.
35 “to have one well-formed creature like a trilobite . . .” Fortey, Trilobite! p. 137.
CHAPTER 22 GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT
1 “In areas of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 48.
2 “Spontaneously, inorganic stone becomes living plant!” Marshall, Mosses and Lichens, p. 22.
3 “more than twenty thousand species of lichens.” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 214.
4 “Those the size of dinner plates . . .” Attenborough, The Living Planet, p. 42.
5 “compressed into a normal earthly day . . .” Adapted from Schopf, p. 13.
6 “stretch your arms to their fullest extent . . .” McPhee, Basin and Range, p. 126.
7 “Oxygen levels . . . were as high as 35 percent . . .” Officer and Page, p. 123.
8 “the isotopes accumulate at different rates . . .” Officer and Page, p. 118.
9 “put them in wind tunnels to see how they do it . . .” Conniff, Spineless Wonders, p. 84.
10 “dragonflies grew as big as ravens.” Fortey, Life, p. 201.
11 “Luckily the team found just such a creature . . .” BBC Horizon, “The Missing Link,” first aired February 1, 2001.
12 “The names simply refer to the number and location of holes . . .” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 411.
13 “as high as 4,000 billion.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 9.
14 “To a first approximation . . . all species are extinct.” Quoted by Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 46.
15 “the average lifespan of a species . . .” Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 38.
16 “The alternative to extinction is stagnation . . .” Ian Tattersall, interviewed at American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.
17 “invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterward . . .” Stanley, p. 95; and Stevens, p. 12.
18 “In the Permian, at least 95 percent of animals . . .” Harper's, “Planet of Weeds,” October 1998, p. 58.
19 “Even about a third