artemis’s Reviews > The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present > Status Update

my bad for the millions of to read updates i was looking at the references lol

"their (passenger pigeons) undoing was their tastiness. native americans ate them but european settlers hunted them on an industrial scale. shot them for sport. destroyed their habitat. (...) from billions to zero in one century." brusatte is making me feel absolutely devastated with this second half of the book man

cant quote the entire bit about dodos, colonization and such but this bit was so.
"I always love scientific mysteries, but these riddles make me sad. Sad because we had the opportunity to learn these things, but did not. Sad because were it not for the excesses of empire and our own ignorance, these birds (...) would still be alive."

wdym i learned theres technically 8 continents instead of 7. also the story of the dodo bird is so much sadder than i realized :((

learning more about dinosaurs this year than i ever have in my life, even as a kid who loved them, i have so much more admiration towards birds now

"it seems impossible but scotland was once subtropical. if i were sitting here 167 million years ago edinburgh would be more like modern day caribbean" and i fear we are going back with this with how bad the heatwaves keep getting

finally got it from the library yay