Paleocene Quotes

“In time, extinction comes for all species. Some leave descendants. Others do not. Beautiful as the image is, there is no tree of life. The shape of biodiversity is more like a chaotic blanket, individual threads splitting, being snipped off, branching again, creating an incredible tangle of species that are both discrete and connected. All the species alive in this moment, at the dawn of the Paleogene, will eventually perish. But some will sprout populations a little different from their point of origin, variations that will survive even as their parent species disappear, and with them the same ecological dance will begin again. The species that exist today will shape what tomorrow looks like, life itself driving the profusion of so many unique forms.”
― Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World

“Undulating rivulets emerged when
Paleocene glacial ice had formed
Fluvial rifts worn in naked chalk hills,
Currents flowed over burnished boulders
Moving past numinous burial mounds.”
― Ruth Ann Oskolkoff, The Bones of the Poor