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Quote by Kenneth Oppel

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Firewing

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Kenneth Oppel
Kenneth Oppel

Kenneth Oppel is a renowned Canadian author known for his young adult literature. Born on August 31, 1967, he has been writing since the 1980s and has published numerous works, including science fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels. Oppel's books are appreciated for their rich imagination and profound themes. more

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“Bats look and behave a whole lot differently than mice or foxes or elephants, but nobody would argue that they're not mammals. No, bats are just a weird type of mammal that evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. Birds are just a weird group of dinosaurs that did the same thing.”

ScienceEvolutionArgumentBatsBirdsDinosaursMammals
Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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“She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me - it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I've seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.”

DarkDrugHeavyEyesWearyBatsWearinessPowderKissesShatter
Book:Affinity
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“She flies higher than she’s ever flown before, maybe she is trying to leave the earth. She isn’t sure, she isn’t thinking about it. She’s far in her mind, deep in her own thoughts, the air on her wings feels amazing, she is swimming, rolling through the air as if it’s water. She lifts her head as she flies and lets out a series of loud chirps. And that’s when she sees it. The largest bat ever. Flying faster than any hawk or eagle or owl, roaring like some sort of monster. She doesn’t know the human word ‘dragon’ otherwise she would call it that. There is no time to flee. No time to turn. No time to shriek, and no pain. It is like being thrown into the stars.”

Bats
Book:Lagoon
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“Much has been written on the excellence of bats' navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles with a horrible thudding noise. They specialize in slamming into walls and falling, fluttering onto your face. As my own 'piece of equipment essential for the field' I would strongly recommend a tennis racket; it is devastatingly effective in clearing a room of bats.”

HumourBats
Book:The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
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“It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.”

EyeProcessChanceHistoryEvolutionEvidenceSpeciesBatsFactDolphinsTopAnimal KingdomFeatureSwampTraitEvolutionaryRollsIndependentlyEvolvedEcholocationAdvantageousEvolutionary Tree
Book:The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
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