Michael Boulter

Pioneering scientist who explored how plants and animals have responded to the changing climate

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If a palaeontologist says mankind faces “imminent extinction’, it is not a reason to stop buying green bananas.

In geological terms, “soon” may still mean we have a few million years to go. However, Michael Boulter was not joking when he warned a conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000 that the human race was speeding up its own elimination.

Professor Boulter’s team at the University of East London had studied the vast fossil record, modelling how species emerge, peak and decline, and found that large mammals are becoming extinct at a much faster rate than predicted. “The Earth needs, from time to time, culls,” he said. “From the evidence we have, there is reason to believe that we humans are interfering with the environment so much that we are making ourselves extinct” He said the “good news” was that life on Earth would continue happily without humans, adding: “Of course, it's poor news for us.”

Boulter expanded on this in his 2002 book Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man, in which he warned that a small trigger event could cause the collapse of the whole network, much as adding a fatal last grain of sand to an overheaped pile can create a series of landslides. Mike Benton, professor of vertebrate palaeontology at the University of Bristol, called him a “pioneer” whose book showed how major crises of the past relate to the Earth's current problems.