Extinction events

“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches” (The Sixth Extinction, 268). This powerful quote, by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, accurately sums up the main message conveyed in Elizabeth Kolbert’s most recent and most successful book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Elizabeth Kolbert is an experienced journalist and author who is currently working as a “staff writer at The New Yorker.” While Elizabeth Kolbert has written on a variety

The dinosaurs appeared after the greatest mass extinction event occurred. This is known as the Permian-Triassic extinction. It has been estimated to have occurred around two hundred and fifty million years ago. (6) It is also known as the Great Dying with over ninety percent of species dying off, leaving the Earth essentially a wasteland. It led to the extinction of “57% of all families, 83% of all genera and 90% to 96% of all species. 53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all

There have been many theories to explain the dinosaur extinction. However, Walter Alvarez and colleagues had discovered the evidence for dinosaur extinction. They found the rocks laid down precisely at the K-T boundary contain extraordinary amounts of the metal iridium. And those materials of the rocks would not normally found on Earth’s surface. Then, they discovered those rocks were asteroids. Scientist discovered the K-T impact crater was deeply buried under in Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. The

Cretaceous-Paleogene Mass Extinction Wil Creasy Student Number: 20921355 The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (K-Pg boundary) was host to one of the three largest mass extinctions in the past 500 million years. Evidence suggests it was the result of a large asteroid impact approximately 65.5 million years ago in Chicxulub, Mexico; hence why the crater it formed was named the Chicxulub crater. The crater was approximately 180 kilometres in diameter and was believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs

The fifth, and one of the largest and most well known extinctions in Earths history was the Cretaceous period, where many species, including the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles, disappeared. This period was widely known as the K-T period, K being the traditional abbreviation for the Cretaceous Period derived from the German name Kreidezeit, and T being the abbreviation for the Tertiary Period (a historical term for the period of time now covered by the Paleogene and Neogene periods)

been five big mass extinction events, characterized as “periods in Earth's history when abnormally large numbers of species die out simultaneously or within a limited time frame.” (BBC) These events are cataclysmic enough to wipeout at least 50% of all organisms living during that period. The causes of mass extinction are many from the asteroids that sealed the fate of the dinosaurs to the volcanoes that choked out air to 96% of the organismic population during the Permian extinction, however one of

The Permian Time frame was the last time of the Paleozoic Time. Enduring from 299 million to 251 million years back, it took after the Carboniferous Time frame and went before the Triassic Time frame. By the early Permian, the two-extraordinary mainland’s of the Paleozoic, Gondwana and Euramerica, had crashed to frame the supercontinent Pangaea. Pangaea was formed like a thickened letter "C." The best bend of the "C" comprised of landmasses that would later wind up present-day Europe and Asia. North

The extinction of dinosaurs could have been caused by many different things. One main reason that is thought around the world is that dinosaurs went extinct because an asteroid fell onto earth at speeds that are too fast for the human mind to even imagine. This idea was thought when and asteroid crater was found near mexico. Also to support the facts many scientist found traces of rare metal onto the earth's surface. This metal is not very common here but is really common in outer space. Today we

65.5 million years ago. It is one of three periods in the Mesozoic Era along with the Triassic and Jurassic periods. The Cretaceous period is well known for the amount of dinosaurs it had, and the event that put an end to the dinosaurs reign, the K-T mass extinction. During the K-T mass extinction, a huge asteroid hit earth and caused tons of dust to infiltrate the air. Only a small portion of dinosaurs died on impact Instead, the dust blocked out sunlight which caused plants to die. Without

Mass extinctions occur when an extremely large amount of species go extinct, meaning most life on Earth dies out. However, there are always a handful of lucky species who make it through. Although each mass extinction has a different cause, there are qualities in species that consistently allow them to survive these events. What determines whether a species survives a mass extinction is its size, population distribution, and diet. A species's size is an important factor in its survival during a mass