Extinction

Norman Myers set a strict numerical bar for calling a region a biodiversity hotspot, and the resulting list of places, covering a small slice of land but a huge share of species, has since directed hundreds of millions of dollars in conservation funding.

Extinction isn’t random — but the 26-million-year pulse Raup found is not a law of nature.

Cuvier didn’t just name extinct beasts — he proved life could vanish, and made Earth’s history a story of catastrophe, not continuity.

A metre-tall skeleton found in an Indonesian cave in 2003 was either a new dwarfed human species or a sick modern human, a dispute settled largely by CT scans of its brain case rather than by its strikingly small size alone.

She didn’t theorise deep time — she dug it up, dissected it, and named its waste.

Geologists spent fifteen years deciding whether human impact deserves its own named epoch, and in 2024 formally said no, even as the biodiversity losses the term describes continue to be measured and debated.

The Alvarez team's 1980 iridium anomaly predicted a hidden asteroid crater, confirmed a decade later at Chicxulub, turning the dinosaurs' extinction from vague speculation into a dated, physically evidenced event.