Everybody loves dinosaurs. Well they do! You name one person that doesn’t. So it was with great sadness that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. Or was it? Have you ever seen Jurassic Park – Lost World. A Tyranosaurus Rex ends up in the suburbs from Jurassic Park. A T-Rex going around your neighbourhood would not be a good look. Your dog’s chain hanging out of its mouth after it had been swallowed. Or what about that lawyer eaten by the T-Rex while he was on the toilet in the first Jurassic Park movie. OK – maybe that’s not a good example. Who cares if a lawyer gets eaten!
So 65 million years ago, this massive asteroid hit the earth, sending up a massive dust cloud that blotted out the sun, leading to the extinction of all of the dinosaurs. Well a lot of them anyway.
But that’s just one theory isn’t it.
Today scientists, like Piet Hut, Walter Alvarez, and Eugene Shoemaker have a new theory. They don’t believe it was just one massive asteroid that took out all of the dinosaurs in one hit. They say it was a billion comets hitting the earth between 95 and 38 million years ago that did it.
So what really happened to the dinosaurs is just a guess. A scientific guess. Looking at other things about the geology of the planet that we believe today, with what we think we know, is the truth. But just like the theory of dinosaur extinction, what we “know” about geology today, might change tomorrow with new theories.
Any way, if you go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and end up wandering into the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda you’ll see a plaque with this grim warning which reads:
“Five major world wide extinction events have struck biodiversity since the origin of complex animal life some 535 million years ago. Global climate changes and other causes, probably including collisions between Earth and extra-terrestrial objects, were responsible for the mass extinctions of the past. Right now, we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.”
Hell that is terrifying. So let’s have a look at how life on earth is already disappearing because of climate change. Don’t change stations or turn me off, because this is one hell of a story and, as always, I’m going to tell you a whole lot of new stuff that you have never heard before that you are really going to want to know.
Tag words: Jurassic Park; Dinosaurs; Tyrannosaurus Rex; Piet Hut; Walter Alvarez; Eugene Shoemaker; Sixth Extinction; Evolution; apes; Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services; Richard Leakey; The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind; Robert MacArthur; E. O. Wilson; Stephen Hawking; Tomas Sedlacek; Chris Thomas; International Union for Conservation of Nature; biodiversity; doomsday scientists; Sixth Global Mass Extinction; Greta Thunberg; Arctic polar bears;
