Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
I was just reading about the Big Five of the Phanerozoic today. I smile that someone used that word today.
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Yeah, what a mess. We're dead in center of "6" right now, by the way.
As far as I know, the current concensus is:
Now: Humans, duh.
KT/KPg: Meteor, duh.
TrJ: POSSIBLE Vulcanism, less dramatic by virtue of it being essentially the same thing as the Great Dying, but with a biosphere (including dinos) better able to breathe in near-anoxic environments.
PTr: One time I saw an animation of this that scared me to death. It had a cross-section/see-through crust, and they showed how this gigantic subduction zone surrounding the entirety on pangae forced the magma into this bubble, which exploded upwards in a mushroom-cloud looking shape and slammed Siberia from underground. It certainly drives the horror of that particular event home. I still can't sleep at night.
DC: Any combination of freezing, anoxia, or meteor, or all three, or none. no body seems to have a clue.
OS: Freezing. Not to snowball earth degree, but pretty bad considering there were animals in that water.
Vendian/Cambrian: Some don't seem to think this counts, but I do. I mean, unless there is some sort of Proarticulate lost world in the Amazon or something I don't know about, it's obvious something terrible happened. It's a little more obvious here though: eyes. Spriggina just wasn't ready for that shit.
The PTr and TrJ fascinate me though. I still get a real sick feeling in my gut if I read about the Great Dying too much, but I still can't believe how almost everything on the frickin' planet died. And TrJ because it just illustrates how much better dinosaurs are than everything else. KT is solved, and everytime I hear someon bring it up I want to punch them in the face, because I just know they're going to slip and say "dinosaurs are extinct," which is for some reason forgivable in some backwards ass nations.
My other favorite extinction is the Oxygen Catastrophe. That, and I love how we seem to have to believe that the Snowball Earth episodes spelled doom for a lot of earthlings, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that.
We've got such a badass history.