50 Fun Facts About The Sixth Extinction

Which US president hoped the Lewis and Clark Expedition would find living giant Ice Age beasts in the West?

Thomas Jefferson had written that the huge animals behind America's fossil bones still lived in the continent's unexplored north. The idea that a species could die out was barely accepted then.

Which animal, a national symbol printed on lottery tickets, vanishes from El Valle to open The Sixth Extinction?

The golden frog is really a toad, and it waves its limbs in a kind of semaphore because the rushing streams where it lives drown out its calls.

Which bird name was first used for the great auk before sailors gave it to southern look-alikes?

Penguin first meant the great auk, a flightless bird of the North Atlantic, and explorers reused the word for the unrelated birds they met in the Southern Hemisphere.

Which extinct human relatives, named after a German valley, left traces of their DNA in people of non-African ancestry?

Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, a discovery that came in 2010 from the first full genome read out of ancient bones.

Which award did The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert win in 2015 in the General Nonfiction category?

The Pulitzer Prize citation called the book an exploration of nature that makes readers face the threat human behaviour poses to a world of astonishing diversity.

White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease first seen in an American cave in 2006, has killed millions of which animals?

Bats with the disease wake from their winter torpor too often, which is thought to burn up the fat they need to last until spring.

Which French naturalist, working at a Paris museum around 1800, established that species can go extinct?

Georges Cuvier showed that giant fossil bones matched no living animal, at a time when many of his peers treated the loss of a whole species as mere speculation.

In which American city's zoo did Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, die in 1914?

Cincinnati was also the home of Incas, the last living Carolina parakeet, and a memorial to the vanished pigeons now stands at the zoo.

Ocean acidification, a threat to corals described in The Sixth Extinction, happens as seawater absorbs which gas?

Carbon dioxide forms a weak acid in water, and the oceans have soaked up about a quarter of all that people have emitted since 1850.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, joined which magazine as a staff writer in 1999?

The New Yorker ran the 2009 article that became the seed of the book, and she realised while reporting it that the subject needed far more room.

Which subtitle completes The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 book about human-driven species loss?

An Unnatural History points to her argument that this die-off, unlike the mass extinctions before it, is being caused by a single species.

Which 2021 book by Elizabeth Kolbert examines technological fixes for nature, such as dimming sunlight to cool Earth?

Under a White Sky takes its title from solar geoengineering, the most extreme fix she covers, and it shows how each cure for one problem can create another.

Which fossil hunter co-wrote a 1995 book also titled The Sixth Extinction, years before Elizabeth Kolbert's?

Richard Leakey wrote it with Roger Lewin, and he had already led Kenya's wildlife service after an outcry over the poaching of elephants.

Which billionaire philanthropist named The Sixth Extinction to his summer reading list in the year it was published?

Bill Gates listed it among six books he recommended on his Gates Notes blog in July of that year.

Which Ice Age relative of elephants, found at Kentucky's Big Bone Lick, names chapter two of The Sixth Extinction?

Mastodon comes from the Greek for breast and tooth, after the cone-shaped cusps on its molars, which look nothing like an elephant's flat grinders.

Which Scottish geologist, a close friend of Darwin, argued in Principles of Geology that Earth changes slowly?

Charles Lyell held that the forces shaping Earth today have always worked at much the same pace, a view that left little room for sudden catastrophes.

Off the coast of which country is Eldey, the island where the last known pair of great auks was killed in 1844?

Iceland's last colony had moved to Eldey only after a volcanic eruption sank its safer, cliff-ringed rock in 1830, and museum collectors soon followed.

Which Nobel-winning physicist and his geologist son Walter proposed in 1980 that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs?

Luis Alvarez had no idea where the impact had happened when he made the case, and the matching crater was identified only years afterwards.

Which buried crater on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula marks the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs?

Chicxulub was found by geophysicists who were looking for oil in the late 1970s, and it took another decade to show the ring was an impact scar.

Which coiled-shelled relatives of squid died out with the dinosaurs and name chapter four of The Sixth Extinction?

Ammonites had thrived for over 300 million years, and they were closer kin to octopuses than to the nautiluses that their shells resemble.

The asteroid strike of 66 million years ago, the fifth mass extinction, closed which geological period?

The Cretaceous ended with the loss of about three-quarters of plant and animal species, including every dinosaur that was not a bird.

Which tiny colonial sea animals, whose fossils look like writing on rock, are collected at Dob's Linn in Scotland?

Graptolites changed form so often that the geologist Lapworth, working at Dob's Linn, showed their fossils could be used to put rock layers in order.

In The Sixth Extinction, which mechanism explains the end-Ordovician die-off, first of the Big Five mass extinctions?

Glaciation locked up so much water that sea levels fell, and the cooling stripped away the shallow shelf habitats where much of the era's life was found.

Huge eruptions in which region, leaving lava fields called the Traps, are blamed for the end-Permian extinction?

Siberia's eruptions went on for roughly two million years, and the gases they released heated the planet and left the oceans starved of oxygen.

Which Dutch Nobel laureate, honoured for work on the ozone layer, popularised the term Anthropocene for the human epoch?

Paul Crutzen argued that people had altered the atmosphere so much in recent centuries that the planet had entered a new chapter of geological time.

Which geological epoch, begun about 11,700 years ago, gives the sixth mass extinction its more formal name?

The Holocene extinction is the scientific label for the present wave of losses, though some researchers prefer to name it after the Anthropocene instead.

One Tree Island, a coral research station near the Tropic of Capricorn, is part of which natural wonder?

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the places Elizabeth Kolbert reports from, and she warns that acidifying seas could finish off corals by the end of the century.

Which sealed glass world in Arizona, home to eight people for two years, held its own small ocean with corals?

Biosphere 2 later passed to Columbia University, whose research there showed how badly acidifying water damages corals.

In which country's Manú National Park did ecologist Miles Silman measure trees creeping uphill as the climate warms?

Peru gave the book one of its clearest cases of species on the move, because Silman could put a speed on how fast the forest was climbing the mountain.

In which rainforest have scientists studied isolated patches of trees, left standing amid cattle pasture, since 1979?

The Amazon experiment cut its fragments in three sizes, of 1, 10 and 100 hectares, to find out how small a forest can be and still keep its species.

Which insects' swarming raids are trailed by tropical antbirds that snatch the small creatures fleeing the column?

Army ants flush out so much prey that around eighteen kinds of antbird specialise in following their swarms.

Which ancient supercontinent names the chapter of The Sixth Extinction on how global trade remixes species?

Pangaea serves as a metaphor in the book, because ships and planes now carry living things across the oceans that kept them apart for millions of years.

Which once-dominant tree of eastern US forests was devastated by an Asian blight fungus that arrived around 1904?

The American chestnut lost between three and four billion trees to the blight in the first half of the twentieth century.

On which Pacific island did the brown tree snake, an accidental arrival after World War II, wipe out most native birds?

Guam offered the snake plenty of prey and no predators, so it grows larger there than it does in its home range.

Which species, the smallest of its family and coated in reddish-brown hair, gets an ultrasound in The Sixth Extinction?

The Sumatran rhino is so hard to breed that a calf born in 2001 was the first captive birth in 112 years, partly because the females ovulate only after mating.

Which Swedish geneticist, a 2022 Nobel laureate, pioneered reading DNA from the bones of long-extinct human relatives?

Svante Pääbo spent a decade on the first such genome, and his methods for sequencing ancient DNA opened a new branch of science.

Which California city's zoo began the first Frozen Zoo, a bank of living cells stored in liquid nitrogen, in 1972?

San Diego's idea has spread, and cells kept in frozen zoos have since been used to clone endangered animals such as the black-footed ferret.

The ʻalalā, a crow that vanished from the wild in 2002 and features in The Sixth Extinction, is native to which islands?

Hawaii lost its last two wild birds in 2002, so the species now depends on captive breeding and on attempts to release it again.

On which Indian Ocean island did the dodo live until its extinction in the 1600s, soon after Dutch sailors arrived?

Mauritius gave Dutch sailors their first recorded sight of the bird in 1598, and the last widely accepted sighting came only 64 years later.

Which striped marsupial predator was lost when the last known animal died in captivity in Hobart in 1936?

The Tasmanian tiger was hunted under government bounties as a threat to livestock, though studies show its jaw was too weak to kill a sheep.

Which giant marine mammal was hunted to extinction within 27 years of Europeans first describing it in 1741?

Steller's sea cow grew up to nine metres long, and by the time it was found it survived only around the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea.

Which inventory, kept by a conservation union since 1964, grades species on a scale that ends with Extinct?

The IUCN Red List keeps a separate grade, Extinct in the Wild, for species that survive only in captivity or cultivation.

Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise and an emblem of extinction, died in 2012 in which archipelago?

The Galápagos research station that cared for him once offered a 10,000 dollar reward for a suitable mate, but he left no offspring.

The moa, giant flightless birds wiped out within a century or so of human settlement, lived only in which country?

New Zealand's largest land animals had just one predator, Haast's eagle, before people arrived and overhunted them.

Which type of fungus, known to researchers as Bd, has driven amphibian declines on several continents?

Chytrid infection attacks the outer layers of the skin, and it has been linked to collapses from Australia to the Americas.

Which of the Big Five mass extinctions, also called the Kellwasser event, struck about 372 million years ago?

The Late Devonian crisis came second of the five in time, and brachiopods and trilobites were among the groups it hit hardest.

Which elephant-sized Ice Age animal was named Megatherium in 1796 from a skeleton shipped from Argentina to Madrid?

A ground sloth of this kind weighed up to four tonnes, and the name it was given simply means great beast in Greek.

The elephant bird, possibly the largest bird that ever lived, was native to which island off Africa?

Madagascar's giant laid the largest eggs known from any bird, reptile or mammal, and it was a plant-eater that shaped the island before people came.

The baiji, a freshwater dolphin that repeated surveys have failed to find, lived only in which river system?

The Yangtze dolphin is classed as critically endangered and possibly extinct, because several searches of the river have found none.

Which mountain goat became the first extinct animal to be cloned back to life, in 2003?

The Pyrenean ibex clone died of a lung defect minutes after birth, which makes it the only animal to have gone extinct twice.