Sublime

It turned out that 1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.

Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood.

On August 3, 1804, Humboldt and Bonpland arrived at Bordeaux, causing a great commotion, since their death by yellow fever had been widely reported some time earlier. They had been gone five years. In addition to all their instruments and Humboldt’s journals and record books, they had brought with them “forty-two boxes, containing an herbal of six

In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.