The previous great extinctions have been the result of often external disasters - a meteorite impact, huge desertification - but never before we had one where one species has done for so many others. They haven't been wholesale removal of habitats because of the activities of one species.
Newton spent the rest of his life campaigning for the preservation of sea birds, and eventually succeeded in lobbying for a bill to protect these creatures-one of the first wildlife protection laws in world history.Everywhere around the world habitat destruction continues and we don't know what this is going to do because other extinctions have not been like this one. Fifteen years later, two naturalists named John Wooley and Alfred Newton went to Iceland to track down the great auk, only to realize that it had gone extinct. Instead of eating the two dead auks, the fishermen sold their catch to an Icelandic dealer, who in turn sold the birds’ remains to a naturalist. In the chase, they broke an auk egg that the two birds had been guarding. The fishermen chased the birds around the island, and eventually captured them. Rumor has it that in 1844, three fishermen rowed to Eldey, where they found the last two great auks on the planet. 150 years ago, fishermen regularly rowed out to the island, where they would encounter great auks. Kolbert traveled there, where she saw huge numbers of gannets-long-necked, cream-colored birds. The final home of great auks was probably the Icelandic island of Eldey. No human being had ever witnessed the origin of a new species, because it took so long-thus explaining why Cuvier’s examination of fossilized cats didn’t necessarily disprove evolution.
Darwin argued that the origin of species was an incredibly drawn-out process, lasting many thousands of years. By the same logic, new species must appear over time, either surviving because of their superior qualities or dying out. Species went extinct because other species had qualities that made them superior at finding food and shelter and, ultimately, reproducing. Life forms on Earth, he argued, were constantly in competition for the limited resources of food, water, and shelter. Darwin argued that there could be no extinction without the origin of new species. Darwin disagreed with Lyell, and proceeded to apply Lyell’s principles of gradual change to life, not just geology. Although Lyell was an important advocate for the principle of gradualism in geology-he believed that the geological world was changing in small, almost immeasurable ways-he didn’t believe in any theory of evolution.
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