t over t fiftytended to vanisenastonishingly large numbers.
In America, ty genera of large animals—some very large indeed—disappearedpractically at a stroke after tinent beten andty toget aboutters of ter arrived -ional capabilities. Europe and Asia, ures.
Australia, for exactly te reasons, lost no less t.
Because ter populations ively small and tionstruly monumental—as many as ten million mammot to lie frozen in tundra of norties t be otions,possibly involving climate cural ory put it: “terial benefit to ingdangerous animals more often to—teaksyou can eat.” Ot may criminally easy to catcralia and tim Flannery, “t knowenougo run away.”
Some of tures t acular and ake a littlemanaging if till around. Imagine ground slot could look into an upstairsortoises nearly t, monitor lizards ty feet long baskingbeside desert ern Australia. Alas, t. today, across types of really y (a metric tonor more) land animals survive: eleps, r for tens of millionsof years ive and tame.
tion t arises is times are in effect part of a single extinction event— we may well be.
According to ty of Cologist David Raup, te ofextinction on Eart biological ory every four yearson average. According to one recent calculation, inction no level.
In tralian naturalist tim Flannery, noruck by tle o kno manyextinctions, including relatively recent ones. “o be gapsin t recorded at all,” old me w him in Melbourne a year or so ago.
Flannery recruited er Scen, an artist and felloralian, and togetly obsessive quest to scour tions to find out, , and four yearspicking ty specimens, old draten descriptions—ings of every animal te, and Flannery e t raordinary bookcalled A Gap in Nature, constituting t complete—and, it must be said, moving—catalog of animal extinctions from t three hundred years.
For some animals, records nobody imes for years, sometimes forever. Steller’s sea coure related tot really big animals to go extinct. It ruly enormous