This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world’s other species of animals abruptly vanish from the foss...
They simply exist, Attenborough adds, testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.
There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, ‘Oh fuck, not another phylum.’ The
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at le...
There isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world's largest park, its most per...
There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large,’ says Tattersall. Huge brains are demanding organs: they make up only 2 per cent of the body’s mass, but devour 2...
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.
There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges.
There is actually a certain value in not finding anything,’ he said. ‘It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving. It’s one of those rare areas where the absence of evide...
Then, about seven million years ago, something major happened. A group of new beings emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savanna. These
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in...
The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying i...
The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previou...
The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine,
The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whi...
The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or B...
The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But...
The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process th...
The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye,
The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners' knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify no...