Climate change: We have never faced a more critical time on our planet

It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.

To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we have come from.

The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels.

For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment.