“came from only about three hundred specimens . . .” Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous, pp. 168-69.

“There is no reason to believe . . .” BBC Horizon, “Crater of Death,” first broadcast May 6, 2001.

“Humans are here today because . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 229.

CHAPTER 23 THE RICHNESS OF BEING

“The spirit room alone holds fifteen miles of shelving . . .” Thackray and Press, The Natural History Museum, p. 90.

“forty-four years after the expedition had concluded.” Thackray and Press, p. 74.

“still to be found on many library shelves . . .” Conard, How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, p. 5.

“The tropics are where you find the variety . . .” Len Ellis interview, Natural History Museum, London, April 18, 2002.

“he sifted through a bale of fodder . . .” Barber, p. 17.

“To the parts of one species of clam . . .” Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p. 79.

“Love comes even to the plants.” Quoted by Gjertsen, p. 237; and at University of California/UCMP Berkeley website.

“Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata . . .” Kastner, p. 31.

“The first edition of his great Systema Naturae . . .” Gjertsen, p. 223.

“John Ray’s three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum . . .” Durant and Durant, p. 519.

“a kind of father figure to British naturalists.” Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 65.

“gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers.” Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p. 59.

“he saw that whales belonged with cows . . .” Schwartz, p. 59.

“mare’s fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock . . .” Thomas, pp. 82-85.

. . . “Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 157.

“transferred, amid howls, to the genus Pelargonium.” Elliott, The Potting-Shed Papers, p. 18

“Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million.”Audubon, “Earth’s Catalogue,” January-February 2002, and Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 132.

“as much as 97 percent . . .”Economist, “A Golden Age of Discovery,” December 23, 1996, p. 56.

“he estimated the number of known species of all types . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 133.

“Other authorities have put the number . . .”U.S. News and World Report, August 18, 1997, p. 78.

“It took Groves four decades to untangle everything . . .”New Scientist, “Monkey Puzzle,” October 6, 2001, p. 54.

“about fifteen thousand new species of all types . . .”Wall Street Journal, “Taxonomists Unite to Catalog Every Species, Big and Small,” January 22, 2001.

“It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!” Ken Maes, interview with author, National Museum, Nairobi, October 2, 2002.

“many species are being described poorly . . .”Nature, “Challenges for Taxonomy,” May 2, 2002, p. 17.

“an enterprise called the All Species Foundation . . .”The Times (London), “The List of Life on Earth,” July 30, 2001.

“your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 16.

“to quote the man who did the measuring . . .”New Scientist, “Bugs Bite Back,” February 17, 2001, p. 48.

“These mites have been with us since time immemorial . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 15.

“Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts . . .”National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.

“If over 9,000 microbial types exist . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 144.

“it could be as high as 400 million.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 8.

“discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.

“tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.

“over three and a half billion years of evolution.”Economist, “Biotech’s Secret Garden,” May 30, 1998, p. 75.

“found on the wall of a country pub . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 75.

“about 500 species have been identified . . .” Ridley, The Red Queen, p. 54.

“all the fungi found in a typical acre of meadow . . .” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 176.

“the number could be as high as 1.8 million.”National Geographic, “Fungi,” August 2000, p. 60; and Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 117.

“The large flightless New Zealand bird . . .” Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p. 2.

“was considered a rarity in the wider world.”New York Times, “A Stone-Age Horse Still Roams a Tibetan Plateau,” November 12, 1995.

“a sort of giant ground sloth . . .”Economist, “A World to Explore,” December 23, 1995, p. 95.

“A single line of text in a Crampton table . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp. 32-34.

“he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection . . .” Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile, pp. 159-60.

CHAPTER 24 CELLS

“about the same number of components . . .”New Scientist, title unnoted, December 2, 2000, p. 37.

“no more than about 2 percent . . .” Brown, p. 83.

“scientists began to find it all over the place . . .” Brown, p. 229.

“It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream . . .” Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology, p. 489.

“‘some few hundred’ different types of cell . . .” De Duve, vol. 1, p. 21.

“If you are an average-sized adult . . .” Bodanis, The Secret Family, p. 106.

“Liver cells can survive for years . . .” De Duve, vol. 1, p. 68.

“not so much as a stray molecule . . .” Bodanis, The Secret Family, p. 81.

“Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork . . .” Nuland, p. 100.

“After he reported finding ‘animalcules’ . . .” Jardine, p. 93.

“there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings . . .” Thomas, p. 167.

“He called the little beings ‘homunculi’ . . .” Schwartz, p. 167.

“In one of his least successful experiments . . .” Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science, p. 28.

“all living matter is cellular.” Nuland, p. 101.

“The cell has been compared to many things . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don’t Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 133; and Brown, p. 78.

“a jolt of twenty million volts per meter.” Brown, p. 87.

“approximate consistency ‘of a light grade of machine oil’ . . .” Nuland, p. 103.

“up to a billion times a second . . .” Brown, p. 80.

“the molecular world must necessarily remain . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 293.

“100 million protein molecules in each cell . . .” Nuland, p. 157.

“At any given moment, a typical cell . . .” Alberts et al., p. 110.

“Every day you produce and use up . . .”Nature, “Darwin’s Motors,” May 2, 2002, p. 25.

“On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 237.

“the single best idea that anyone has ever had . . .” Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 21.