Extinction Lessons From The Dinosaurs
The dinosaurs dealt with much worse climate change than us (the air was literally on fire) and somehow survived. The terrible lizards got shrunk down to rotisserie size, but they were still alive. After thousands of years, they even thrived, coming back as ‘terror birds’ in time. As I’ve written, we should be so lucky.
As Riley Black wrote in her book The Last Days Of The Dinosaurs, there’s a few lessons we can learn from the dino’s ‘demise’ as we face our own decline. I’ll cover the two lessons here. One is that extinction is avoidable, but that shrinking our ambitions is not.
The first lesson is that the dinosaurs did not go extinct. This has been hotly debated, but is now mostly settled. Birds are dinosaurs, ergo extant, not extinct. As Black said, “Birds were not simply waiting in the wings when the asteroid struck. They were part of the great flowering of dinosaur diversity, their roots anchored deep in the Jurassic.”
What did go extinct are the big dinosaurs. These unfortunate beasts got alternately fried, baked, frozen, and then had their bones literally dissolved in acid (rain). Their world was literally rocked and it’s a miracle they came out in any form at all. Immediately after impact (if you weren’t hit, tsunami’d or earthquaked to death), much of the atmosphere turned into a goddamn air fryer. Temperatures reached 260℃, which makes modern climate change look like a cakewalk. Then all the debris blocked out the sun, dropping temperatures 60℃ and leading to a near collapse in the whole food chain.
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