Starry sky in the darkest of the night.

You have been selected to contribute to a very important investigation...

Elizabeth Kolbert will present you with the pieces of the puzzle to solve the mystery of life on this planet!

Mind you, you'll need to travel across the globe and through the depths of History; For the clues can only be found in very special places where space and time collide to bear witness of an apocalyptical past (how dramatic!).

Such places include:

• The Chicxulub crater—a scar on the surface of the Earth that forever marks the end of the dinosaurs;
• The One Tree Island—a safe haven for an agonizing species (coral), and for humans, who can contemplate starry skies in the darkest of the nights.

You might have picked up on this by now. And this is paradoxical.

For the author, life on Earth is better understood through the lens of mass extinction, and its abhorred cousin, evolution.

For a while, the two theories were at odds, not unlike their founding fathers (Curvier, Wallace, and Darwin), who quarreled over the incongruity of fossils' anatomy— Eventually, the catastrophists and the evolutionists made sense of life on our planet in the early XIXth century.

The scientific revolution is in march, coincidently, the industrial one is too...