Sunday afternoon devolved (evolved?) into reading
The rain has given much this afternoon: help to the garden and two insightful articles updating organic evolution, esp. the discontinuities: New Yorker 5/11 p. 50 (Copnik) and 5/25 p. 52 (Kolbert.)
To me, as a grad student in the mid 70s, the matters of diversification and extinction tackled in the two articles above were emerging, but not emphatically and clearly, and mostly regarded darkly.
Neither article is written as a report, esp. of scientific findings, yet both point to how the classical work has been elaborated, in light of events. Just as the mathematics of Newton's times was not up to the discrete and probablistic nature of physics later, classical continuous evolution, uniform, more or less, over time, and dependent exclusively on the expedience of immediate survival given adaptive mutation, incompletely accounts for both prolific diversification and sharply attenuating times, it seems.
Not space here to outline the issues, but just to remark that the two are presented as stories and are engaging without strain. If you're looking for an interlude of thought along a highway parallel to more usual fare, I recommend these.