flares.
This last is a particularly intriguing possibility. Nobody knows how big solar flares can get because we have only been watching them since the beginning of the space age, but the Sun is a mighty engine and its storms are commensurately enormous. A typical solar flare-something we wouldn’t even notice on Earth-will release the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs and fling into space a hundred billion tons or so of murderous high- energy particles. The magnetosphere and atmosphere between them normally swat these back into space or steer them safely toward the poles (where they produce the Earth’s comely auroras), but it is thought that an unusually big blast, say a hundred times the typical flare, could overwhelm our ethereal defenses. The light show would be a glorious one, but it would almost certainly kill a very high proportion of all that basked in its glow. Moreover, and rather chillingly, according to Bruce Tsurutani of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “it would leave no trace in history.”
What all this leaves us with, as one researcher has put it, is “tons of conjecture and very little evidence.” Cooling seems to be associated with at least three of the big extinction events-the Ordovician, Devonian, and Permian-but beyond that little is agreed, including whether a particular episode happened swiftly or slowly. Scientists can’t agree, for instance, whether the late Devonian extinction-the event that was followed by vertebrates moving onto the land-happened over millions of years or thousands of years or in one lively day.
One of the reasons it is so hard to produce convincing explanations for extinctions is that it is so very hard to exterminate life on a grand scale. As we have seen from the Manson impact, you can receive a ferocious blow and still stage a full, if presumably somewhat wobbly, recovery. So why, out of all the thousands of impacts Earth has endured, was the KT event so singularly devastating? Well, first it
The KT meteor had the additional advantage-advantage if you are a mammal, that is-that it landed in a shallow sea just ten meters deep, probably at just the right angle, at a time when oxygen levels were 10 percent higher than at present and so the world was more combustible. Above all the floor of the sea where it landed was made of rock rich in sulfur. The result was an impact that turned an area of seafloor the size of Belgium into aerosols of sulfuric acid. For months afterward, the Earth was subjected to rains acid enough to burn skin.
In a sense, an even greater question than that of what wiped out 70 percent of the species that were existing at the time is how did the remaining 30 percent survive? Why was the event so irremediably devastating to every single dinosaur that existed, while other reptiles, like snakes and crocodiles, passed through unimpeded? So far as we can tell no species of toad, newt, salamander, or other amphibian went extinct in North America. “Why should these delicate creatures have emerged unscathed from such an unparalleled disaster?” asks Tim Flannery in his fascinating prehistory of America,
In the seas it was much the same story. All the ammonites vanished, but their cousins the nautiloids, who lived similar lifestyles, swam on. Among plankton, some species were practically wiped out-92 percent of foraminiferans, for instance-while other organisms like diatoms, designed to a similar plan and living alongside, were comparatively unscathed.
These are difficult inconsistencies. As Richard Fortey observes: “Somehow it does not seem satisfying just to call them ‘lucky ones’ and leave it at that.” If, as seems entirely likely, the event was followed by months of dark and choking smoke, then many of the insect survivors become difficult to account for. “Some insects, like beetles,” Fortey notes, “could live on wood or other things lying around. But what about those like bees that navigate by sunlight and need pollen? Explaining their survival isn’t so easy.”
Above all, there are the corals. Corals require algae to survive and algae require sunlight, and both together require steady minimum temperatures. Much publicity has been given in the last few years to corals dying from changes in sea temperature of only a degree or so. If they are that vulnerable to small changes, how did they survive the long impact winter?
There are also many hard-to-explain regional variations. Extinctions seem to have been far less severe in the southern hemisphere than the northern. New Zealand in particular appears to have come through largely unscathed even though it had almost no burrowing creatures. Even its vegetation was overwhelmingly spared, and yet the scale of conflagration elsewhere suggests that devastation was global. In short, there is just a great deal we don’t know.
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.
Clearly it helped to be at home in water. The KT impact wiped out almost 90 percent of land-based species but only 10 percent of those living in fresh water. Water obviously offered protection against heat and flame, but also presumably provided more sustenance in the lean period that followed. All the land-based animals that survived had a habit of retreating to a safer environment during times of danger-into water or underground- either of which would have provided considerable shelter against the ravages without. Animals that scavenged for a living would also have enjoyed an advantage. Lizards were, and are, largely impervious to the bacteria in rotting carcasses. Indeed, often they are positively drawn to it, and for a long while there were clearly a lot of putrid carcasses about.
It is often wrongly stated that only small animals survived the KT event. In fact, among the survivors were crocodiles, which were not just large but three times larger than they are today. But on the whole, it is true, most of the survivors were small and furtive. Indeed, with the world dark and hostile, it was a perfect time to be small, warm-blooded, nocturnal, flexible in diet, and cautious by nature-the very qualities that distinguished our mammalian forebears. Had our evolution been more advanced, we would probably have been wiped out. Instead, mammals found themselves in a world to which they were as well suited as anything alive.
However, it wasn’t as if mammals swarmed forward to fill every niche. “Evolution may abhor a vacuum,” wrote the paleobiologist Steven M. Stanley, “but it often takes a long time to fill it.” For perhaps as many as ten million years mammals remained cautiously small. In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.
But once they got going, mammals expanded prodigiously-sometimes to an almost preposterous degree. For a time, there were guinea pigs the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of a two-story house. Wherever there was a vacancy in the predatory chain, mammals rose (often literally) to fill it. Early members of the raccoon family migrated to South America, discovered a vacancy, and evolved into creatures the size and ferocity of bears. Birds, too, prospered disproportionately. For millions of years, a gigantic, flightless, carnivorous bird called Titanis was possibly the most ferocious creature in North America. Certainly it was the most daunting bird that ever lived. It stood ten feet high, weighed over eight hundred pounds, and had a beak that could tear the head off pretty much anything that irked it. Its family survived in formidable fashion for fifty million years, yet until a skeleton was discovered in Florida in 1963, we had no idea that it had ever existed.
Which brings us to another reason for our uncertainty about extinctions: the paltriness of the fossil record. We have touched already on the unlikelihood of any set of bones becoming fossilized, but the record is actually worse than you might think. Consider dinosaurs. Museums give the impression that we have a global abundance of dinosaur fossils. In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial. The giant Diplodocus that dominates the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London and has delighted and informed generations of visitors is made of plaster-built in 1903 in Pittsburgh and presented to the museum by Andrew Carnegie. The entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York is dominated by an even grander tableau: a skeleton of a large Barosaurus defending her baby from attack by a darting and toothy Allosaurus. It is a wonderfully impressive display-the Barosaurus rises perhaps thirty feet toward the high ceiling-but also entirely fake. Every one of the several hundred bones in the display is a cast. Visit almost any large natural history museum in the world-in Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Mexico City-and what will greet you are antique models, not ancient bones.
The fact is, we don’t really know a great deal about the dinosaurs. For the whole of the Age of Dinosaurs, fewer than a thousand species have been identified (almost half of them known from a single specimen), which is about a quarter of the number of mammal species alive now. Dinosaurs, bear in mind, ruled the Earth for roughly three times as long as mammals have, so either dinosaurs were remarkably unproductive of species or we have barely scratched the surface (to use an irresistibly apt cliche).
