Excerpts: “It is true that some vertebrates can be very small, weighing a matter of a few grams: but all vertebrates are visible to the naked human eye” (p. 36).

“Around 90 percent of all known coal deposits were laid down in just one heady 70-million-year interval, the age of the lycopod forests” (p. 61).

“A sizable beneficiary was the liver, which generated a lot of heat and, in a large dinosaur, was the size of a car. The air-cooled internal workings of dinosaurs were more efficient than the liquid-cooled mammalian version. This allowed dinosaurs to become much larger than mammals ever could, without boiling themselves alive” (p. 96-97).

“In the mammals, they reached their acme. Above the ground and by day, the Triassic was a riot of reptiles. But the night belonged to the mammals. It was to be their playground for the next 150 million years” (p. 120).

“At the very end of the last glaciation, about ten thousand years ago, the climate of Europe went from subarctic to equably temperate in the space of a human lifetime” (p. 147).

“Rather in the manner of the ugly duckling Homo sapiens hid in the Makgadikgadi wetland for seventy thousand years. But when it finally emerged, it had become a swan” (p. 172).

“Within the next few thousand years Homo sapiens will have vanished. The cause will be, in part, the repayment of an extinction debt, long overdue. The patch of habitat occupied by humanity is nothing less than the entire Earth, and human beings have been making it progressively less habitable” (p. 188).

Gee, Henry (2021). A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth — 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters. New York: St. Martin’s Press.