Dinosaur Extinction Quotes

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.

This will be the greatest discovery since the extinction of dinosaurs.” “Assuming dinosaurs did exist, that is,” Derkein said. Alex shook her head. “Couldn’t just let me have this moment, could you?

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large-headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

The only thing we can't buy more of is time." she said. "And dodo birds. We can't buy any more of them. they're extinct. And dinosaurs.

I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.

The tyrannosaurus looked a little shamefaced - but only a little, for dinosaurs would rather drown in tar than admit they're wrong. That unfortunate attitude played a key role in their extinction.

CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction- level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, Cro- Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.

The modern world seems invincible. Like the extinct dinosaurs.

At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.

All the explanations proposed seem to be only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.

This is not a monument to loss. This is an ode to resilience that can only be seen in the wake of catastrophe.

We're like . . . like dinosaurs bedazzled by all the pretty lights in the sky, too fucking stupid to realise it's a comet getting closer and closer.

Inveterate creationists, then or now, never allow their faith to fall victim to facts.

And I remember thinking my dad’s death was like that. It’s like the extinction of the dinosaurs. A meteor hits your heart and changes everything forever. But you’re still here. You go on.

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

My father then said, ‘Mike, I’ve told you how dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid crashed into the Earth. The world first became a sea of fire, and then sank into a prolonged period of darkness and coldness.… One night, you woke from a nightmare, saying that you had dreamt that you were back in that terrifying age. Let me tell you now what I wanted to tell you that night: If you really lived during the Cretaceous Period, you’d be fortunate. The period we live in now is far more frightening. Right now, species on Earth are going extinct far faster than during the late Cretaceous. Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you’re seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much vaster process. We can have no sea birds, but we can’t be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turned fifteen. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you’d never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you’d have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month.… These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.

It's an extension of how we often cope in the wake of our own personal traumas, remembering the wounds as we struggle to see the growth stimulated by terrible events. Resilience has no meaning without disaster.

But I am designed to last forever," said the expendable, "if not interfered with." "Isn't that nice? Expendable yet eternal. You'll be able to go back and observe any part of human history that you wish. Watch the pyramids being unbuilt. See the ice ages go and come in reverse. Watch the de-extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor leaps out of the Gulf of Mexico." "I will have no useful task. I will not be able to help the human race in any way. My existence will have no meaning after you are dead." "Now you know how humans feel all the time.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

The dinosaurs never discovered what caused their extinction, either.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right. —LARRY NIVEN

The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson

Beginnings need endings, a lesson that we can either hold carefully or that we can deny until it finds us.

We’re going to discuss only four or five different problems the Earth has, though there are multiple different scenarios going on. If any one of these scenarios were to break down, all life on the planet would eventually die. And at the moment, they’re all about to break down — it’s just a matter of which one breaks down first. And whenever one system goes, then all the rest of them will go eventually, and that’s it, there won’t be any more human life. It will be over with, and we’ll end up just like Mars or the dinosaurs. A few years ago, around the turn of this century, there were thirty million species of life forms on Earth — thirty million different species of life. In 1993 there were about fifteen million. It took billions of years to create these life forms, and in less than a blink of an eye, a mere hundred years, half of the life on this dear Earth is dead. Around thirty species a minute are now becoming extinct somewhere. If you were to watch this planet from space, it would appear to be dying very, very rapidly. Yet we’re going on as though nothing’s happening and everything’s great. We’re sticking money in the bank and driving our cars and just wiggling right on. Yet from an honest point of view, we have a real life-and-death problem going on here on Earth, and few people seem to be really serious about it.

The battle for life on the first day of the Paleocene is won and lost by little more than biological threads. Only those organisms that are able to find shelter—below the ground, beneath the water—have any chance. All others, from the largest Edmontosaurus to the smallest insect, perish. There is no behavior that can save them. Evolution prepared them for the world of tomorrow, and perhaps the day after, but not for this.

I stop reading after half an hour. I’ve had enough. Humanity has hit a brick wall. We’re facing our end, like the dinosaurs millions of years before us. The only difference is we’ve got journalists on hand to document every blow and setback, cataloguing our rapid, painful downfall in vibrant, vicious detail. Personally, I think the dinosaurs had the better deal. When it comes to impending, unavoidable extinction, ignorance is bliss.

At the end of a mass extinction, the tree of life has lost several branches-and yet, afterward, life does go on. Plants regreen the earth and animals repopulate the oceans; different species relentless forward march. There will be life on planet Earth after the sixth mass extinction, but we are not able to imagine it any better than the dinosaurs could have imagined a world dominated by mammals walking on two legs, driving bulldozers, and flying airplanes.

The thing we can learn from the extinction of dinosaurs is that a random event in the universe can wipe us out. It does not matter whether we do the right things or not. The universe is neither benevolent nor hostile. It is thoroughly indifferent.

Is this what happened to the dinosaurs? Is this the true cause of their disappearance? We may never know. But it is no accident that human beings are so interested in dinosaur extinction. The decline of the dinosaurs allowed mammals - including us - to flourish. And that leads us to wonder whether the disappearance of the dinosaur is going to be repeated, sooner or later, by us as well. Whether at the deepest level the fault lies not in blind fate - in some fiery meteor from the skies - but in our own behavior.

Because extinction has always been a great mystery. It’s happened five major times on this planet, and not always because of an asteroid. Everyone’s interested in the Cretaceous die-out that killed the dinosaurs, but there were die-outs at the end of the Jurassic and the Triassic as well. They were severe, but they were nothing compared to the Permian extinction, which killed ninety percent of all life on the planet, on the seas and on the land. No one knows why that catastrophe happened. But I wonder if we are the cause of the next one.” “How is that?” Kelly said.

Some animals absolutely prospered—including, a little surprisingly, the turtles once again. As Flannery notes, the period immediately after the dinosaur extinction could well be known as the Age of Turtles. Sixteen species survived in North America and three more came into existence soon after.

I feel pretty sure I know why the dinosaurs went extinct. They were waiting for Sam to pick out a cell phone case.

Only by dint of extinction, can Dinosaurs afford to be cynical about the future.

That's the goal of paleontology, after all - to start with the offerings of death and work back towards life.

There are times in life you wish dinosaurs weren’t extinct and could be whistled to come and gulp you down.

People say they don’t believe in luck: luck is the reason the dinosaurs got wiped out and why human beings became the new dominant species on this planet.

Well, did you know that the dinosaurs really didn’t go extinct? Aliens were so fascinated by them that they decided to gather them all up and take them to their own planet.” Henri

Well, you’re always talking about the dinosaurs being extinct. Did they know? How did they feel? Blah blah blah. But they’re not really extinct. Because right at the end, he talks about the new breed of flying dinosaurs. They were smaller, bat-sized, able to fly, so when the asteroid hit, these new guys were somehow able to survive. And eventually... They evolved.

It suggests to us that behavior of complex animals can change very rapidly, and not always for the better. It suggests that behavior can cease to be responsive to the environment, and lead to decline and death. It suggests that animals may stop adapting. Is this what happened to the dinosaurs? Is this the true cause of their disappearance? We may never know. But it is no accident that human beings are so interested in dinosaur extinction. The decline of the dinosaurs allowed mammals—including us—to flourish. And that leads us to wonder whether the disappearance of the dinosaurs is going to be repeated, sooner or later, by us as well. Whether at the deepest level the fault lies not in blind fate—in some fiery meteor from the skies—but in our own behavior. At the moment, we have no answer.

Spread your arms out to your sides, like a plane. Your wingspan is a timeline. Your left fingertip represents the time of the first single-celled life on earth. And your right fingertip is right this minute. Between the two is 3.7 billion years of time, the history of life on earth. From your left fingertip, all the way up your arm, past your left shoulder, across your chest, and past your right shoulder, life on earth is nothing but bacteria. By the time you reach your right wrist, the most impressive form of life on earth, the king of beasts, is the worm. In the middle of your right palm you finally get your dinosaurs, and they're extinct by your last finger joint. Run your eyes along that history again so far. All that history, all that life, and still no appearance by the Main Attraction, the species for whom everything is supposedly made - humankind. So when do humans finally show up at the party? Well it's more than fashionably late. Homo sapiens fits in one fingernail clipping.

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.

It suggests to us that behavior of complex animals can change very rapidly, and not always for the better. It suggests that behavior can cease to be responsive to the environment, and lead to decline and death. It suggests that animals may stop adapting. Is this what happened to the dinosaurs? Is this the true cause of their disappearance? We may never know. But it is no accident that human beings are so interested in dinosaur extinction. The decline of the dinosaurs allowed mammals—including us—to flourish. And that leads us to wonder whether the disappearance of the dinosaurs is going to be repeated, sooner or later, by us as well. Whether at the deepest level the fault lies not in blind fate—in some fiery meteor from the skies—but in our own behavior. At the moment, we have no answer.” And then he smiled. “But I have a few suggestions,” he said.

Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?” “Almost,” Harding said. “Hang on.” “And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs—being complex creatures—might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.

Along with osmium and platinum, iridium is one of the three heaviest (densest) elements on the Table—two cubic feet of it weighs as much as a Buick, which makes iridium one of the world’s best paperweights, able to defy all known office fans. Iridium is also the world’s most famous smoking gun. A thin layer of it can be found worldwide at the famous Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary† in geological strata, dating from sixty-five million years ago. Not so coincidentally, that’s when every land species larger than a carry-on suitcase went extinct, including the legendary dinosaurs. Iridium is rare on Earth’s surface but relatively common in six-mile metallic asteroids, which, upon colliding with Earth, vaporize on impact, scattering their atoms across Earth’s surface. So, whatever might have been your favorite theory for offing the dinosaurs, a killer asteroid the size of Mount Everest from outer space should be at the top of your list.

The traces of the dinosaurs howl in our memories. Had they been alive we would have exterminated them, but we respect their traces. It is the same with the human race: the more we imperil it, the more meticulously we preserve its remains.

If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us. When we dig beneath our feet into the soil to unearth the fossil record, we see evidence of many ancient life-forms. Yet only the smallest handful survive today. Millions of species have appeared before us; they had their day in the sun, and then they withered and died. That is the story of life.

If you were to condense Earth’s history into a single year, land-dwelling animals come onstage around December 1, and the dinosaurs don’t go extinct until the day after Christmas. Hominids start walking on two feet around 11:50 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and recorded history begins a few nanoseconds before midnight. And

No animal species had managed to conquer the world and it's resources like humans had. Even dinosaurs were now extinct. Human beings had won the overall victory, they had sourced and evolved, developing knowledge which allowed them to command and control their environment. The world and all its resources were now a slave to humanity.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

I wasn’t sure what the most surreal part of this interaction was. If it was the fact that I was standing in some random dark woods at night, the fact that I was doing that with a dinosaur, or the fact that said extinct animal was trying to give me a pile of sticks. It was like having to smile and nod at a kid’s macaroni art you had no idea what to do with, and you had no idea what the picture was, but you didn’t want to crush their spirit.

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

The light from the next closest star, called Proxima Centauri, shows us how it looked just over four years ago. The light from a galaxy that lies 65 million light-years away left that galaxy when the dinosaurs were facing extinction. The most distant objects and events existed when the universe itself was only a few hundred thousand years old. Astronomers see them as they were more than 13 billion years ago. When you look out in space, you’re looking back into time.

Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.

About a hundred million years ago, the dinosaurs had everything their own way. They thought they knew all the answers. They thought they could hear the grass growing. Maybe they could. But according to Titsling and Boukanowski, their social life was a disgrace. They changed their sex every other month and used profane language, and at the age of three, at the very tender age of three, they would go steady in no uncertain manner and bring forth eggs as large as footballs! Without benefit of clergy or city hall. Extinction! That's what they asked for, that’s what they got.

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.

The most spectacular example of continental drift and tectonic plate movement has to be the Indian Plate, a triangle of geomorphic crust which aeons ago broke away from the single supercontinent of Gondwanaland to drift north-eastwards across the globe. As it slid so it scraped over magmatic hotspots, releasing stupendous amounts of volcanic gases and lava – a catastrophic venting that may well have contributed towards the extinction of the greater dinosaurs but most certainly created the layers of thick lava topped by granite boulders that make up much of the triangular tableland known as the Indian Plate, which the Arya (of whom I have a lot more to say in a later chapter) named the Deccan (derived from the Sanskrit dakshina, ‘south country’).

When punk and new wave styles exploded in the late ’70s, some established artists were nimble enough to respond to the changes around them. Some grumbled, “What am I supposed to do, forget how to play?”, and continued to ride their dinosaurs into extinction, but others willingly adapted to the streamlining and back-to-basics urges of the times, without giving up all they had learned. Former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel, for example, or former Yes keyboardist Trevor Horn, continued to produce vital, influential music through the ’80s and ’90s. Ian Anderson has continued to lead Jethro Tull out of the ’60s and ’70s and quietly through the decades, making high quality music and finding a large enough audience to continue recording and touring worldwide.

In time, extinction comes for all species. Some leave descendants. Others do not. Beautiful as the image is, there is no tree of life. The shape of biodiversity is more like a chaotic blanket, individual threads splitting, being snipped off, branching again, creating an incredible tangle of species that are both discrete and connected. All the species alive in this moment, at the dawn of the Paleogene, will eventually perish. But some will sprout populations a little different from their point of origin, variations that will survive even as their parent species disappear, and with them the same ecological dance will begin again. The species that exist today will shape what tomorrow looks like, life itself driving the profusion of so many unique forms.

Life, in short, just wants to be. But—and here’s an interesting point—for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long. Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.” Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.

This canvas of human prehistory is distinctively modern. The renowned theorist of culture W. J. T. Mitchell once remarked that dinosaurs are the quintessential modernist animal, since in Shakespeare’s time no one knew such creatures had ever existed. In a similar way, until quite recently most Christians assumed anything worth knowing about early humans could be found in the Book of Genesis. Up until the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘men of letters’ – scientists included – still largely assumed that the universe did not even exist prior to late October, 4004 BC, and that all humans spoke the same language (Hebrew) until the dispersal of humanity, after the fall of the Tower of Babel sixteen centuries later.1 At that time there was as yet no ‘prehistory’. There was only history, even if some of that history was wildly wrong. The term ‘prehistory’ only came into common use after the discoveries at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858, when stone axes, which could only have been fashioned by humans, were found alongside remains of cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species, all together under a sealed casing of rock. This, and subsequent archaeological findings, sparked a complete rethinking of existing evidence. Suddenly, ‘the bottom dropped out of human history.

So why haven’t we been visited? Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy—or in the observable universe—on which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self-reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence. We are used to thinking of intelligent life as an inevitable consequence of evolution, but what if it isn’t? The Anthropic Principle should warn us to be wary of such arguments. It is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes. It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single-cell organisms, may live on if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Perhaps intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution, as it took a very long time—two and a half billion years—to go from single cells to multi-cellular beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available before the Sun blows up, so it would be consistent with the hypothesis that the probability for life to develop intelligence is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life. Another way in which life could fail to develop to an intelligent stage would be if an asteroid or comet were to collide with the planet. In 1994, we observed the collision of a comet, Shoemaker–Levy, with Jupiter. It produced a series of enormous fireballs. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about sixty-six million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human would have almost certainly been wiped out. It is difficult to say how often such collisions occur, but a reasonable guess might be every twenty million years, on average. If this figure is correct, it would mean that intelligent life on Earth has developed only because of the lucky chance that there have been no major collisions in the last sixty-six million years. Other planets in the galaxy, on which life has developed, may not have had a long enough collision-free period to evolve intelligent beings. A third possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form and to evolve to intelligent beings, but the system becomes unstable and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion and I very much hope it isn’t true. I prefer a fourth possibility: that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, but that we have been overlooked. In 2015 I was involved in the launch of the Breakthrough Listen Initiatives. Breakthrough Listen uses radio observations to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, and has state-of-the-art facilities, generous funding and thousands of hours of dedicated radio telescope time. It is the largest ever scientific research programme aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth. Breakthrough Message is an international competition to create messages that could be read by an advanced civilisation. But we need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilisation, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus—and I don’t think they thought they were better off for it.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

In 2008 Prum’s graduate student Jakob Vinther, with Prum and two of their Yale colleagues, identified melanosomes (tiny organelles that contain melanin) in fossil feathers from the Lower Cretaceous (100–65 MYA) of Brazil and the Early Eocene (56–49 MYA) of Denmark. They were thus able to show that those feathers were colored with black and white stripes. Indeed, they concluded that most fossil feathers are actually preserved in such a way that it might be possible to determine the colors of extinct birds and feathered dinosaurs.

Have I not told you dinosaurs were past glory they extinct big time.

CHAPTER ONE Introduction to Digital Compositing A massive spacecraft hovers over New York, throwing the entire city into shadow. A pair of lizards, sitting in the middle of a swamp, discuss their favorite beer. Dinosaurs, long extinct, live and breathe

The K-T Extinction of 65 million years ago destroyed the dinosaurs that had already roamed our planet for close to 150 million years.  This puts the six or seven thousand years since the appearance of the first proper human civilisations into perspective.

Most of these take a strong stand and present a case either for or against impact theory. In my opinion, the best of the pro-impact books is James Lawrence Powell's Night Comes to the Cretaceous (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1998). The case against the impact theory is vigorously argued by Charles Officer and Jake Page in The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy (Reading, MA: Helix Books, 1996).

Both books are fun to read, and you learn a lot whichever view you adopt. J. David Archibald's Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

Reality was a flexible thing, easily bent, but not easily broken. It had its own ways of protecting itself from such ordinary threats as apocalypse. But that every day the human race woke up to discover the dinosaurs were still extinct, the speed of light hadn't slowed to fifteen miles per hour, and the continents were indeed where they had left them when they went to sleep was due, in some small way, to an obscure, hairy landlord who never actually set foot in the universe he kept running properly.

The sweet, rancid stench already wafting from the erstwhile Triceratops is intoxicating.

I feel like I miss the non-avian dinosaurs—nostalgia for a time I can never witness, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Often, this is about as far as the discussion goes: an immense rock smacked into the planet and myriad species were summarily snuffed out. Simple as that.

Think about it. Look at what it took for intelligence to emerge in Nature. Today is Monday. If the 3.8 billion years life has thrived on Earth equated to 38 days, then for over a month all we had around here were microbes. “Complex, multicellular life arose last Wednesday. Dinosaurs came in on Friday. Sometime this morning, around 1am, a meteor struck and the best part of an entire phylogenetic clade was pushed to extinction. Those few avian dinosaurs that did survive went on to supply us with deep fried chicken and scrambled eggs.” I can’t help but smile at Avika’s compressed take on the history of life on Earth. “Mammals have been around at least since Sunday, but they were little more than rodents most of the time. That rock from space cleared out vast swathes of the ecosystem, and mammals rushed to fill the gap. “Every multicellular creature has some degree of intelligence, or at least instinct, but it wasn’t until some point in the last hour that the wisest of men, Homo sapiens arose, and yet even then, intelligence was little more than a desperate struggle for survival. “For the last seven minutes, or roughly two hundred thousand years, our intelligence extended little further than chipping at rocks to make stone knives. “In the last thirty seconds, we’ve been on a bender. We’ve built pyramids, sailed the oceans and landed on the Moon!” I say, “So your point is, human intelligence is the pinnacle of evolution?” “Oh, no. Not at all. There’s plenty of intelligence in the animal kingdom, especially among mammals, birds and cephalopods, but it took 3.8 billion years before intelligence could exploit its own ingenuity and blossom in its own right. “If all our intellectual accomplishments are the result of the last thirty seconds, then perhaps creating artificial intelligence isn’t quite as easy as busting out some Perl scripts.” I

There’s nothing fucking worse than knowing that you’re just like everybody else. What a messed-up, lousy existence. And in this great country of Japan—the birthplace of all my fancy ancestors—everyone, everyone wants to be like everyone else. That’s why it is such a safe place to live, but it’s also a dinosaur village. It’s extinct, pal. Carve up your piece and invest your spoils elsewhere.

Why did countless creatures and plants of dinosaur eras have to be made giant? The enormous amount of bio-organic matter was needed for forming the proper terra firma of the Earth. When the required vast layers of rich outer crust and soil were formed, the huge-sized species of fauna and flora were carefully removed from the scene of life, by adjusting the planet's climate ‘settings.’ Isn't it obvious that it’s done intentionally? It created that perfect basis for smaller and more intelligent species to evolve and thrive; slowly but steadily leading to the appearance and progress of the humanity.

Beautiful as the image is, there is no tree of life. The shape of biodiversity is more like a chaotic blanket, individual threads splitting, being snipped off, branching again, creating an incredible tangle of species that are both discrete and connected.

Physicists calculated that the initial impact that created the Chicxulub crater in Central America would have been powerful enough to blow many terrestrial dinosaurs in the vicinity off into space.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the centuries when space was extended, when the realm of the visible had suddenly been increased by the invention of the microscope and the telescope. We have images from that era which remind us of quite how astonishing that sudden stretching of space must have been. There is the Dutch lens-grinder Antony van Leeuwenhoek, peering down his rudimentary microscope in 1674 to see a host of micro-organisms teeming in a drop of pond-water ('The motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift , and so various upwards, downwards and round about, that 'twas wonderful to see …'). There is Galileo scrying upwards through his telescope in 1609, and becoming the first human to realize that there are "lofty mountains" and "deep valleys" on the moon. And there is Blaise Pascal's mingled wonder and horror at the realization that man is poised teeteringly between two abysses: between the visible atomic world and, with its 'infinity of universes, each with its firmament, planets, and its earth', and the invisible cosmos, too big to see, also with its "infinity of universes", stretching unstoppably away in the night sky. The nineteenth century, though, was the century in which time was extended. The two previous centuries had revealed the so-called "plurality of worlds" which existed in the tracts of space and the microcosmos of atoms. What geology revealed in the 1800s was the multitude of 'former worlds' on earth, which had once existed but no longer did. Some inhabitants of these former worlds offered an excitement beyond the general thrill of antiquity. This was the range of monstrous creatures which had formerly lived on earth: mammoths, mammals, 'sea-dragons' and dinosaurs (literally 'fearfully great lizards'), as they were christened in 1842 by the palaeoanatomist Richard Owen. Fossilized bones and teeth had been plucked from the earth for centuries, but not until the early 1800s was it realized that some of these relics belonged to distinct, and extinct, species.

Homo sapiens: you are obsolete! Evolution, the laws of which you understood, has already created its new branch, and you are no longer the latest stage, the crown of creation. You are a dinosaur. Now you must step aside for a new, more perfect species. No need to be egotistical. Game over, it’s time you let others play. Your time is up. You’re extinct. And let future generations wrack their brains over the question of what made Homo sapiens extinct.

And those bigger bodies run hot. Eoconodon and its mammalian neighbors are endotherms. They maintain their body heat at a high, constant temperature, generated from the inside. The mammals do not need to lie out in the sun to warm up each morning like the crocodiles or the little crunchy lizards Eoconodon sometimes nabs as the reptiles go about their sluggish morning routine. The mammals are always quick, always ready, but maintaining such an active state requires more fuel. Simply scarfing down any plants in the vicinity won’t do. Mammals need energy-rich foods that provide more nutrition for each chew, and they need to find them every day. Gorging might hold over the likes of Eoconodon for a day or two, but the fuel goes fast. Without sufficient salad in the surrounding environment, the possibilities of growing larger would stay closed.

We dig up dinosaurs to try and figure out what happened to them. Perhaps someday dinosaurs, in the form of corvids, will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.

After all, the dinosaurs were superbly adapted to their environment; even if they perceived the signals of change, they became extinct because they could not adapt to unfamiliar environmental conditions.

Jedi, understand this: There's nothing fucking worse than knowing that you're just like everybody else. What a messed-up, lousy existence. And in this great country of Japan - the birthplace of all my fancy ancestors - everyone, everyone wants to be like everybody else. That's why it is such a safe place to live, but it's also a dinosaur village. It's extinct, pal. Carve up your piece and invest your spoils elsewhere. You're a young man, and someone should tell you the real truth about this country. Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different. The other thing is that the elite Japanese want to be English and white. That's pathetic, delusional, and merits another discussion entirely.

You’re a dinosaur, and sooner or later a meteor’s headed your way. Enjoy extinction.

Ben didn’t smile. “We can’t know everything. Even the smartest scientists can’t know everything. What if there are still dinosaurs living in the places that we haven’t explored yet?

There are hosts of other (lesser known) supposed extinction models that state the dinosaurs died because of: • An explosion of a nearby star that sent deadly cosmic radiation to earth • Diseases (like viruses or bacterial outbreaks) • Starvation • Climate change • Acid rain • Toxic foods • Tsunamis or other local floods • An ice age • Parasites • Rapid fungal outbreaks • Egg disorders • Magnetic field reversals • Mammals ate too many of their eggs • Volcanic eruptions • Aliens that invaded and killed or took them (yes, there are people who believe this) Notice that man hunting them and destroying their habitats to the point of extinction is not listed as a possible reason and not even considered an option by evolutionists (since humans and dinosaurs cannot live together in their secular story). And yet this was surely the case, after the Flood, up until dinosaurs went fully extinct.

Humanitarian Nuclear Physics (The Sonnet) One nuclear warhead contains 9 lbs of plutonium, Which can electrify 2000 households for a year. Yet you use that majestic power of atom as pawn, In your stoneage geopolitical games of fear. When monkeys crack the mystery of the atom, Without developing any civilized purpose, They go blind with the madness of power, Atom bombs become newage arrows and spears. Hypnotized by the mindless pursuit of "could", Apes rarely ever stop to question if they should! What good is such science without conscience, What good is a scientist without a vision for good! Either atom bombs will be obsolete as bow and arrow, Or humankind will go extinct like dinosaurs tomorrow.

Rocks don't lie.

My great fear is that one day my children will sit on my lap and say read to me, mommy one more book; please? and we’ll flip through dog-eared pictures of blue whales and elephants and pangolins the way I used to look at dinosaurs; in wonder of great creatures that used to be. --Extinct

Many parts of the natural world we take for granted today are relatively recent arrivals. Grasses, the main component of the largest ecosystems of the planet today, only arose at the very end of the Cretaceous, less than 70 million years ago, as rare parts of the forests of India and South America. Grass-dominated ecosystems did not emerge until about 40 million years before the present. There were never dinosaur grasslands, and, in the northern hemisphere, grass simply did not exist.

Pterosaurs were the first group of vertebrates (animals with backbones) to evolve wings and fly. Dinosaurs - in the guise of birds - were the second. This means that diosaurs are still among us today. We're so used to saying that dinosaurs are extinct, but in reality, over ten thousand species of dinosaurs remain (as bird species).

For instance, in 1927, one dictionary still viewed dragons as real but rare, stating:  A huge serpent or snake (now rare); a fabulous monster variously represented, generally as a huge winged reptile with crested head and terrible claws, and often as spouting fire; in the Bible, a large serpent a crocodile, a great marine animal, or a jackal.5 But, again, this makes sense. As people spread out and settled in more lands, dragons, which were largely rare creatures anyway, were pushed to the brink of extinction.

High altitude astronomy is a dinosaur that needs to go extinct.

THE FOURTH FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF PRIMORDIAL DIMENSIONAL SPACE: GOD’S THEORY OF RANDOMNESS Primordial dimensional space and Minus Zero may not have always existed. They were random events in the life cycle of the primordial dimension space. Everything that came from them was also random. This was the God’s Theory of Randomness. The God’s Theory of Randomness says that randomness is the main theme of development in the primordial dimension, which is beyond all other dimensions. This randomness often shows up outside the framework of a symbolic order that is not dominant. The God’s Theory of Randomness can explain everything, such as the origin of the universe, the extinction of dinosaurs, the advancement of civilization, the rise and fall of technology, the inequality between the rich and the poor, and the destiny of individuals.

I’m sure every timestream in the universe has something good to offer. That doesn’t mean I need to visit them all. You say you’ve brought dinosaurs back from extinction in your twenty-first century? I’ll pass. I’ve seen how that movie ends.”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2035 Chapter

Postmodern” has been defined too many ways, by too many people, to be simply adopted. “Postrealist” is both more inclusive and more direct: having discovered and explored realism, artists have gone on to try any number of other methods, no one of which has clearly replaced realism—which trundles on like the crocodile, unaware that dinosaurs are extinct.