mass extinction
milhayser | April 4, 2016In January, Hillary Clinton still possessed the benefit of the doubt. Memories of her and Bill snarling at Barack Obama in 2008 had faded, and despite her long and dreadful record, it's always possible to turn over a new leaf. But Clinton's ongoing response to Bernie Sanders shows why she is unfit for the presidency. Even as the frontrunner, Hillary shows no leadership ability; she, too, follows Sanders, trailing him to the left as he takes meaningful positions on issues like income inequality and campaign finance reform. Her saccharine smile says "I can do that too!" but truly she should be…
milhayser | August 14, 2013Life has been growing on Earth for about 4 billion years, and during that time there have been a handful of mass extinctions that have wiped out a large percentage of complex lifeforms. Asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, climate change, anoxia, and poison have dispatched untold numbers of once-successful species to total oblivion or a few lucky fossils. Species also die off regularly for much less spectacular reasons, and altogether about 98% of documented species no longer exist.
Cry me a river, you say, without all that death there would have been no gap for vertebrates, for mammals, for…
tlambert | November 10, 2010Jeff Harvey recommends this Climate Progress Post on the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on the sixth mass extinction. It's been sixty-five million years since the last one, so this is an unprecedented opportunity for ecologists to study such an event.
See also Jeremy Jackson "How we wrecked the ocean":
laelaps | May 13, 2010Components of the newly-described Fezouata fauna. a, Demosponge Pirania auraeum b, Choiid demosponge c, Annelid worm d, Organism showing possible similarities to halkieriids e, Possible armoured lobopod f, Thelxiope-like arthropod g, Marrellomorph arthropod, probably belonging to the genus Furca h, Skaniid arthropod i, Spinose arthropod appendage
apparatus consisting of six overlapping elements. From Van Roy et al, 2010.
When the Cambrian period comes up in conversation, it is usually in reference to the evolutionary "explosion" which occurred around 530 million years ago. Animal fossils from…
razib | January 21, 2010Modern civilization has extremely deleterious consequences in regards to species richness, primarily through destruction of habitat. Because of these negative aspects of modernity hunter-gatherers have been idealized as a model of humanity at equilibrium with their ecology. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus lays out the revisionist, and to some extent now mainstream, argument that the American wilderness which European settlers encountered was actually an instance of "re-wilding" in the wake of native demographic collapse due to disease. But setting this case aside, what…