Fariha’s Reviews > "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide > Status Update

In the long galleries of the geological museum are the records of judgments that have been engraved on the rocks. Example: Atlantosaurus. Whether it was through some change of climate, some subtle disease, or some subtle enemy, these titanic reptiles dwindled in numbers and faded at last altogether. Save for the riddle of their scattered bones, it is as if they had never been.
The long roll of paleontology is half-filled with the records of extermination; whole orders, families, groups, and classes have passed away and left no mark and no tradition upon the living fauna of the world. Many fossils of the older rocks are labeled “of doubtful affinity.” Nothing living has any part like them. They hint merely at shadowy dead subkingdoms, of which the form eludes the zoologist.
Their situation is almost beyond our ability to comprehend, Wells writes. Our earth is still warm from human beings, our future apparently full of human life. The most terrible thing we can imagine is a desolated earth in which the last human being, utterly alone, stares extinction in the face.