Permian–Triassic extinction event

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is by Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert is an American journalist, observer, author, and 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…

Sixth Extinction is a book all about the fact that the earth as we know it has proceeded through 5 “waves” of mass extinctions, and is currently in the middle of yet another wave of mass extinction (the sixth). These “unnatural” occurrences have displayed shocking changes to the variety of species on the globe, hence the title: “The Sixth Extinction, An Unnatural History.” 2. What gave people the idea that organisms may have gone extinct because of catastrophes? The term extinction…

fossil evidence suggests that dinosaurs originated early in the Middle Triassic time period, during the recovery of life from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (Benton et al. 2014). Transient episodes of unusually warm and wet conditions, interrupting long periods of cool and dry conditions, may have played a role in mass extinctions and long-term evolutionary trends (Retallack 2013). Although the Permo-Triassic mass extinction wiped out nearly 85% of species, the crises marked the beginning…

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…

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…

another, without the other they could not occur. If the extinction of the dinosaurs was gradually over millions of years “both process probably played a role”(DinoBuzz). Most scientists do agree that an asteroid was a factor, it’s also acknowledged thaDinosaurs roamed the earth for 163 million years.(Dinosaur Worlds). They thrived as one of the most successful groups of animals in the history of life on land(PBS). Then, 66 million years ago, the last group of dinosaurs disappeared forever;…

composition by Stephen Jay Gould, the hypotheses of dinosaur extinction are intermingled with the all-consuming thoughts and dilemmas that plague much of the modern society, including: sex, drugs, and violence; as well as one great unknown- how dinosaurs became extinct. Gould adds the public’s lust for outré, controversial statements with real, scientific inferences. Plaguing the world with questionability, the explanation for the dinosaurs’ extinction is still unidentified, but Gould…

Have you ever wondered what the other half of the world was like? Just like a person can wonder what the 96.5 of the earths water was like. Talking about the mysterious ocean. Did you know it might actually be possible for us to have living dinos in the water, want to know why? Because of the whole theory that a meteor hit earth and killed all living dinos except for some that water dinos were fine and didn’t get effected. So one-day u can discover a megalodon eating your butt But that…