Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event

sedimentary layer were brought there via volcanic eruptions (“What killed the dinosaurs?” n.d. para. 5). Because iridium is common in the Earth’s core, this supports the volcanism hypothesis. Iridium could have been brought to the surface by these explosive events, forming the high levels we now see in the sediment layer. In addition, there is evidence of lava flow, covering 200,000 square miles at depths of more than 6,500 feet in the Deccan region of India (“What killed the dinosaurs?” n.d.…

The K-T or the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, was a mass extinction over unknown origin that took out an estimated 60-75 percent of all the species on earth 66 million years ago, most famously the dinosaurs. It was the end of the Cretaceous period and the Mesozoic Era and created the beginning of the Cenozoic Era that is still happening today. Geologically speaking this extinction happened in a very short amount of time. Although the most well known species to go extincted during this time was…

The Permian Mass Extinction Introduction There are five major extinctions in history: the Late Devonian, the Ordovician-Silurian, the Permian-Triassic, the Triassic-Jurassic, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary. Known as the Big Five, these extinctions exceeded all others in size and destruction, each killing more than 60% of species from that period. Each one acted as a bottleneck, allowing the survival of only a fraction of the organisms that had been thriving before, from which evolution and life…

Did one single disaster cause the K-T extinctions? Some scientists and people are committed to just one reason the K-T extinctions occurred but in this paper many possibilities will be explored with evidence to back up why they could have been a cause as well to the extinctions. Everyone will ultimately make his or her own decision/thoughts on what could have happened, and of course all hypotheses would be subject to analysis. Asteroid impact theory. The impact of a 10 km+ asteroid would blow a…

The extinction of the dinosaurs is one of the most well-known mysteries in our great world, the Earth has its history in the layers, these layers can tell us when, where, and how something happened, the K-T boundary is no exception. These large slabs of Earth can show us the past, millions of years of history, to the beginning. What scientists around the world are trying to figure out, is why the dinosaurs died out, there are many different and unique theories about the K-T extinction. Some…

will it take before this number starts plummeting?3 We all are all aware of how terrible species extinction is, and are constantly being told how it is all a human caused problem. It is common for species to go extinct naturally, but at a low rate. The annual background extinction rate is believed to have been somewhere around 0.0001%, which amounts to about the extinction of 10 species per year.4 Extinction is not as dark and depressing as it is sold on…

65,000,000 years ago, an entire species was killed off. There are so many different theories of how the dinosaurs dissapeared. There are many different ways to explain the extinction which took place 65 million years ago. One of the main reasons was the possibility of a sudden change in the climate or atmosphere. For instance, a nearby supernova explosion could heat up the upper atmosphere, disturbing the ozone layer. Disturbing the ozone layer could produce large ice clouds which would cool…

Great Extinctions Extinction is just another word used for the dying off of one species or of many species. Since the beginning of time there have been five mass extinction and then some smaller extinctions. Either big or small, they play a huge role in the evolution of the species around us. Whether they were a common ancestor, or a close relative to an organism, they still helped the organisms we know today evolve and adapt to the environment that we now share. During the extinction events…

punishment for breaking sacred law, crashing into Earth and killing everything in the vicinity. And we can still see the scars of this event today. The local people feared if they strayed too close to this land they might reignite some otherworldly creature. Luritja people were forbidden from going near the craters, as that was where the…

Around 543 million years ago the Cambrian Explosion occurred, some say it may represent the most important evolutionary event in the history of life on Earth. The “Cambrian Explosion” refers to the rapid appearance of most major living animal body plans in the fossil record within 20 million years or less. This may seem to be a long period of time but is a relatively short in evolutionary history. This swift change in the fossil record appears to be inconsistent with the ideal of the slow…