It’s certainly valuable new information. The outstanding puzzle has always been, why were all dinosaurs killed off but not all mammals or reptiles?
extinction
Lovelock (now 100 years old): Cyborgs will replace us and treat us like houseplants
Like Darwin’s Ascent of Man, Lovelock’s Ascent of the Cyborgs has no ladder and he doesn’t sense the need for one.
At The Atlantic: Dinosaurs might have had whole civilizations; how would you know?
Actually, the Anthropocene is mainly a testament to the enormous power of immaterial ideas to shape things, for good or ill. It is the best argument against materialism and it is right under our noses.
Philosopher puts a positive spin on contemplating human extinction
So many scandals and impasses that science faces today stem in large part from the problem Moynihan avoids. Facts don’t validate themselves outside a structure that posits meaning from beyond the system. The system does not validate itself.
Researchers: 50 million years needed to recover extinct NZ birds! No, alas,, it’s impossible
Apart from cloning, to get the exact same birds, we’d have to rent the multiverse (if it existed). And then we would have an infinite number of planets with islands like New Zealand, including these birds. Never mind one…
Why didn’t the saber-toothed tigers survive?
If climate change, humans, or any other effect tended to mean smaller prey animals, it’s clear what happened: Saber teeth are not needed for dealing with sheep and calves. A mountain lion lugs less equipment around but gets the same value.
Are extinctions evidence of a divine purpose in life?
Hugh Ross: As with all mass extinction events that have occurred in the history of Earth’s life, the Pliocene-Pleistocene mass extinction event poses a serious challenge to models attempting to explain the history of Earth’s life by strictly natural means.
A new bug for Darwin’s finches: Mating disrupted by parasite
The whole story leaves one wondering what role incidental factors played, over many centuries, in the constant, reversible micro-evolution of the once-iconic Darwin’s finches.
Fun: Animatrons of extinct giant predators
Jurassic Park as if you were part of the cast.
New Ordovician) fossils (470 to 459 million years ago) show survival of “extinct” life forms
Researcher: The discovery of uncommon wiwaxiids fossils in this time frame suggests the animals lived on Earth for a far greater span of time than previously understood.
Astronomer: Seeing dead space aliens would teach us a lesson
Remember the astronomer who thought that space detritus Oumuamua might be an extraterrestrial lightsail? He’s back: Harvard professor Avi Loeb thinks humans should be on the hunt for signs of alien life and alien death. During a recent presentation at the The Humans to Mars Summit, Loeb argued that the discovery of a dead alien […]
Bird “goes extinct” twice
Note that loss of the ability to fly is treated in this story as a form of evolution, as if the loss resulted in greater complexity rather than less. As if it wasn’t fatal when the island was inundated. But it enables evolutionary biologists to say that “evolution happened.”
The doomsday extinction rhetoric ignores the speciation mess
Without a clearly understood concept of “species”, it’s hard to know what extinction even means. If all individual life forms are unique, then every death is an extinction. Where do we draw the line and why, exactly?
Narwhal thriving despite low genetic diversity
It turns out that low genetic diversity is not necessarily a death sentence. It depends on what else is going on, perhaps. By the way, we still don’t know why the narwhal has a three-metre tusk (tooth).
Megacarnivore found in drawer
The cat came back. so to speak. Actually, extinct Simbakubwa kutokaafrika was not a cat but a hyaenodont, larger than a polar bear, with three rows of shearing teeth. Found between 1978 and 1981, the jawbone had to be stored on special shelving due to its size.