Stephen J. O'Brien Quotes

The cause of these great extinctions, the most extensive in the seventy-million-year record for mammals, is a mystery. The two prevailing guesses, climatic environmental pressure or the destruction caused by human immigration in these regions, are at a stalemate. Nearly all regions of extinction were briefly inhabited by early humans, which is why some feel they played roles. I was not there at the time, so I can only speculate, but surely a global catastrophe of some sort triggered the cataclysm.

[Giant northern elephant seals] were presumed extinct as late as 1912 when a group of eight seals was spotted on Guadalupe Island in the South Pacific by a Smithsonian expedition, which shot seven of them! Fortunately they missed one and failed to spot a few others.

It seems a shame that less than 1 percent of all the species that ever lived survive today and that only about 5 percent of the sum of the world's living species have names. Yet, our preservation efforts must be built on a solid foundation: an ordered taxonomy of living species. So we are forced to do as politicians do--compromise and move forward--often before all the required data are at hand. Every good scientist I know finds such an exercise counterintuitive, difficult, and sometimes impossible. But the really good ones try anyway.

Within a few months Mitch Bush, head veterinarian at the National Zoo, and David Wildt, a young reproductive physiologist working as a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, were on a plane bound for South Africa. Bush is a towering, bearded, giant of a man with a strong interest and acumen in exotic animal veterinary medicine, particularly the rapidly improving field of anesthetic pharmacology. Wildt is a slight and modest Midwestern farm boy, schooled in the reproductive physiology of barnyard animals. His boyish charm and polite shy demeanor mask a piercing curiosity and deep knowledge of all things reproductive. Bush and Wildt's expedition to the DeWildt cheetah breeding center outside Pretoria would ultimately change the way the conservation community viewed cheetahs forever.