DailyDirt: Who Needs Dinosaurs Anyway?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Jun 25th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Jurassic World raked in over a billion bucks in less than 2 weeks by digitally re-creating some enormous (and sometimes fictional) dinosaurs. A few folks are actually working on re-animating prehistoric animals and other ancient organisms, but do we really need to bring these species back? Perhaps we should work on preventing an artificially-created extinction event of our own before we try to reverse the effects of the last one?

An impact event that left a 110-mile-wide crater off the Yucatan coast of Mexico is most likely the cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. That impact happened 66 million years ago, and it took a couple of million years for the ocean biosphere to recover its diversity afterwards. [url]
A mass extinction occurring over 200 million years ago might have had a few contributing factors -- perhaps bacteria (aka methanosarcina) produced a world-changing amount of methane? Volcanoes might have also been a contributing factor, too, but we may never really be certain what actually happened that many millions of years ago. [url]
We're headed for another mass extinction event, and the 'Sixth Great Extinction' is probably already underway. Species are dying off at a rate that's over 100 times higher than 'normal' -- are we only concerned when the next 'great extinction' also includes humans? [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: bacteria, biosphere, dinosaurs, ecosystem, extinction, global climate change, methane, methanosarcina, prehistoric animals, sixth great extinction, species, volcanoes

6 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2015 @ 6:51pm

The Gods of Yore
Humans have a responsibility of spreading earth based life to as many barren planets in this galaxy as we possibly can. Eventually all life forms die out and cease to exist, but so far at least some portion lived and spread again to establish a full ecosystem once more. Improve each world until it is capable of sustaining life for billions of years given the chance and we will have atoned for the species that will never again walk the earth.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2015 @ 8:17pm

Yeah, and who is one of the writers on that study that says we're in a mass extinction? Why non other than Paul Erlich, Mr. "Every fucking prediction he makes is wrong!"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Nunc_ (profile), 25 Jun 2015 @ 10:11pm
  
  Re:
  The boy who cried wolf may be right this time. Just look at the amount of species with just a few hundred animals left. Even if they recover, a fully healthy population is difficult with low genetic diversity.
  Look at the amount of species with only one habitat left. Single points of failure inevitably lead to disaster.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
wallow-T, 26 Jun 2015 @ 8:20am

Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction" is a magnificent book, lyrically beautiful writing, and the profound message that, as a species, humans are The Extinction Machine, and have been since our earliest days. The chapter on how we came to have the concept of "extinction" is poetic. My highest recommendation. Do not miss this book.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
download abcd 2 torrent, 14 Jul 2015 @ 4:12am

Jurassic world
this is all about the filml
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
jurassic world cast and crew, 14 Jul 2015 @ 4:13am

this is
this is als slns akaushal
[ link to this | view in chronology ]