“The Mona Lisa of paleontology.”
This is a metaphor expressed by museum director Pascal Tassey in reference to a mastodon fossil which he terms “the beginning of everything.”
“Human language is like the genetic code.”
Paleontologist Michael Benton is the source of this simile to describe how “information is stored and transmitted, with modifications, down the generations.”
“Terrible, horrible, no-good day"
The author’s allusive metaphor for the "day at the end of the Creataceous" period on which a cataclysmic astronomical event doomed the dinosaurs to extinction.
“Out of Africa”
The unofficial, unscientific metaphorical term for the theory which had dominated the study of human evolution for a period lasting roughly a quarter of a century.
“A luxury food…like a large truffle.”
This metaphorical imagery references mastodons as food for predators once they began going extinct. By that time a mammoth “was something you could enjoy once in a while.”
