Summary and Analysis of the Sixth Extinction by Worth Books

Author:Worth Books
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worth Books
Published: 2017-02-06T20:42:23+00:00

Timeline

460,000,000 BCE (approx.): Earliest land plants being to populate the land midway through the Ordovician period.

450,000,000 BCE (approx.): End-Ordovician (first) Extinction, caused by glaciation. Graptolites become extinct.

370,000,000 BCE (approx.): Late Devonian (second) Extinction, caused by anoxia.

315,000,000 BCE (approx.): Earliest reptiles.

252,000,000 BCE: End-Permian (third) Extinction, caused by global warming, ocean acidification, and increase in atmospheric sulfides.

200,000,000 BCE (approx.): Late Triassic (fourth) Extinction, caused by volcanic activity.

148,000,000 BCE (approx.): Earliest birds.

130,000,000 BCE: Earliest flowering plants.

65,000,000 BCE: End-Cretaceous (fifth) Extinction, caused by an asteroid impacting the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. Dinosaurs and ammonites become extinct.

55,000,000 BCE (approx.): Earliest primates appear.

35,000,000 BCE (approx.): Glaciation of Antarctica.

15,000,000 BCE (approx.): Earliest Great Apes appear.

2,580,000 BCE (approx.): Ice ages begin.

300,000 BCE: Neanderthals emerge.

200,000 BCE: Homo sapiens emerge.

40,000 BCE: Homo sapiens make contact with Neanderthals; Neanderthals become extinct shortly after.

11,700 BCE (approx.): Last ice age ends. Megafauna extinction event. American mastodon becomes extinct.

1739: French soldiers discover American mastodon fossils in Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and ship them down the Mississippi River and across the Atlantic to Paris for study.

1769: James Watt patents the steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution begins to take root in Great Britain.

April 4, 1796: Georges Cuvier presents his lecture built upon the fossils from Big Bone Lick that asserts “the existence of a world previous to ours.”

1806: Cuvier publishes the name of a unique, extinct species, the American mastodon, in a Parisian newspaper.

1844: Great auk becomes extinct.

November 24, 1859: Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, the foundational text of evolutionary biology.

June 1980: George Alvarez presents evidence of the iridium layer and his theory of the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous period.

1993: Bd outbreak begins in Queensland, Australia.

February 2006: Fungus linked to white-nose syndrome is first identified on little brown bats in New York State.

2014: Stuart Pimm’s article is published in Science magazine; it outlines how current extinction rates have risen to about one thousand times the likely background rate of extinction.

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