Extinctions: From Dinosaurs to You

On the whole, I can't say that I had great expectations for this book, but since it seemed to be well-received I decided to plow forward. However, once I tripped over the phrase of how the early mammals that survived the end of the Cretaceous period were just "a bunch of cowardly, nocturnal, unsophisticated rodents" rather put me off, as this underrates their neurological and sensory advancement, and their efficiency (see Elsa Panciroli's "Beasts Before Us" (2021)). It certainly made me wonder about how well Frankel had assimilated the science of it all.

Still, to give Frankel his due, this book was apparently his own exercise in self-education, as he works through the various kinds of extinction processes, from human intervention to big show more rocks from space, and generally does so in a tone that mostly seems non-patronizing and preachy (an admitted problem for a lot of the unconverted). show less

There is no doubt that homo sapiens got where they are at the expense of other living beings. Many creatures had to go extinct to leave us our place in the world, and others owe their disappearance to our intense predatory activity. By predatory activity, however, in the modern age we can no longer speak of active hunting, which has all in all become marginal, but relative to the environment, which reduces the animals' means of subsistence.
This volume discusses all the extinctions that have dotted the Earth's history since the earliest times, examining their reasons and describing the consequences, and also hints at possible future extinctions, including our own...