Cretaceous

staff writer at The New Yorker. The Sixth Extinction won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015; I chose this nonfiction book because I hadn’t heard of the concept of a sixth extinction. I had previously learned of multiple extinctions that occurred in the Cretaceous, Ordovician, Permian, and Triassic-Jurassic periods, but I became curious just by the thought of what Kolbert meant by a sixth extinction. She claims that this extinction could be the most devastating yet due to humans, and gives different…

Mountains is, how did the mountains form so far within the interior of the continent? The central and eastern portion of the Rocky Mountains is thought to have formed during the Laramide orogeny; which is believed to pre-date the Jurassic and early Cretaceous accretion of the terrenes that make up the North American cordillera. Meaning that this portion of the Rocky Mountains had to have formed 700-1500 km inboard from the nearest convergent plate boundary (English et al.…

Many can probably guess that lethal coal mines, the offshore drilling explosions and the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill as being a principal culprit of ocean acidification but have you ever thought that global warming actually has a much larger role in ocean acidification than we think? That is why we need to be educated on what ocean acidification is, what are the effects of ocean acidification, who are the ones being mostly affected, and how can we resolve this issue. According to NOAA…

Sharks don’t fossilize well because they’re from the class of chondrichthyes meaning their skeletons are made of cartilage, a flexible connective tissue. This is one of the reasons why there is a disagreement over when the first shark first existed. However, shark teeth do fossilize well and sharks produce thousands of teeth in a lifetime. The oldest shark teeth date back to the Devonian Period about 400 million years ago and were found in Europe. Shark scales also fossilize well.…

outlined profile of Tesaiyac on the face of Half Dome and tears running down her face” (Yosemite Half Domes, 2013-2014). Although this story is completely unrealistic, it still encouraged geologist to find truth in the Half Domes creation. During the Cretaceous period, the Pacific tectonic place and the North American plate were slowly merged together and downward. This movement caused the edges of the plates to reach their melting points and they commenced to spit out pillowing lava. This…

The Massest of Mass Extinctions With all the post-apocalyptic themed movies coming out of Hollywood, most people are probably familiar with the concept of a mass extinction. In those kind of movies the cause is often a manmade problem, such as nuclear war. However, in the earth’s distant past, we were not around to destroy ourselves. So what happened? 250 million years ago the Permian period came to an end in a mass extinction causing 95% of species living in the ocean to die (Cort, 2006). To…

because it can only eat one food, and can only copulate a couple weeks out of the year, but sometimes, It 's not their fault… a mass extinction is “the extinction of a large number of species within a relatively short period of time, as between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods when three-quarters of all species on Earth, including most dinosaurs, became extinct” (“Mass Extinction”). Planet Earth is on the brink of a 6th mass extinction because of humans contributions to climate change,…

Pesticide resistant GMOs, and their effects on the wellbeing of the planet In an event as influential as the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous period, Homo-Sapiens began their work terraforming their world around them. They annihilated species while promoting other. They destroyed landscapes to fulfill their wants. They mixed and meddled into everything imaginable. Over the course of their actions they slowly tapped into the promoting force of life itself… Evolution. At first they bred animals…

been estimated that up to 100 species goes extinct; the rate of extinction is 20 to 100 times faster than it was in the past which is in fact a conservative estimate. Scientists had dubbed this issue as the brink of the 6th mass extinction with the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, the last mass extinction, being 65 million years ago. Greenhouse gases emission is rising at the highest rate its ever been in 30 years. The fact of the matter is you don't even have to believe in climate change. "I get…

Symbiosis describes a relationship between species, in which at least one organism benefits. Ants and plants interact in many puzzling ways, but one type of interaction has fascinated ecologists for centuries. Mutualism is a type of symbiosis, where both species benefit from the relationship. Ant to plant mutualisms are facultative, meaning they are not necessary for each other’s survival. However, the survival of both species lends greatly to this complex relationship. (Boucher D.H. 1985) To…