Cartoon Slide Show: We’re Doomed

In “The Lost World,” the second of a two-part Annals of Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about human-driven mass extinctions and about the future of geology. (Part one is here.) Fossil records of strange and fantastic creatures that no longer walk the Earth (plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, dodos, and awesome megafauna), have long inspired artists as well as historians. They’ve even been the source of humor—cartoons about extinction have a long history in the pages of The New Yorker. See a selction above.