Chixculub: a new view (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, August 14, 2023, 17:11 (257 days ago) @ David Turell

An interesting view of how dinosaurs affected the ecology loss and how humans compare:

https://aeon.co/essays/earths-story-is-not-about-dynasties-but-communities?utm_source=A...

"The worst day in the entire history of life on Earth happened in the northern springtime. On that day, the last of the Age of Dinosaurs, a roughly seven-mile-wide chunk of rock that had been hurtling towards our orbit for millions of years slammed into Earth’s midsection and immediately brought the Cretaceous to a close. The consequences were so dire that survival in the hours immediately following impact was merely a matter of luck.

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"The entire reason we so often fixate on the supposed dominance of the dinosaurs is because we now see ourselves in that position. For more than a century, the decimation of the ‘ruling reptiles’ has been taken as a cautionary tale of what could happen to us –

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"T rex existed as part of an ecosystem, both shaped by and shaping the world around it. The dinosaur could even be said to have been an ecosystem unto itself, a living animal that harboured parasites and bacteria in and outside its body (just like us). The dinosaur was large, impressive and no doubt ferocious, but it was also a living thing at the intersection of various ecological connections. To say the dinosaur ‘ruled’ anything is ridiculous, a form of fossiliferous individuality that ignores broader communities.

***

"Prior to the impact, the average dinosaur weighed about three and a half tons and was roughly the size of a small African bush elephant. Such immense animals browsed and grazed bushels of vegetation at a time, trampled pathways through the forests, pushed over trees, and left plenty of chlorophyll-packed dinosaur pats to keep prehistoric dung beetles busy. Every choice a dinosaur like the three-horned Triceratops or shovel-beaked Edmontosaurus made altered the landscape in some fashion, from busting up rotting logs inhabited by invertebrates to creating shallow ponds in areas where they frequently churned the soil. Big dinosaurs kept the forests open and clustered together, their appetites and footfalls altering the shape of the forest itself. But now they are all gone, leaving forests to grow thick and tall.

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"We are living through an ecological crisis of our own making. The loss of every species, whether documented by science or not, is not just another tally of biodiversity’s losses. When a species vanishes, it leaves a void in its ecosystem. The way those living things uniquely interacted with the world vanishes, nudging adjustments in the ecosystem that once hosted the species. The extinction of a plant might alter nutrient cycling in a patch of forest of what plants a herbivore eats. The disappearance of a carnivore might make prey populations more vulnerable to disease if another predator doesn’t take up its role. A large herbivore’s population crashes and forests grow differently, some plants losing a means to disperse their seeds and others growing thicker in the absence of large feet trampling down trails through the woodland.

"Evolution and extinction are bound together in these small, often-invisible interactions between species, the connections that continually shape the unique nature of life on our planet. In our present moment, we are not only playing a role in which lineages will survive and which will disappear. Our actions are also cutting through life’s web, affecting entire communities and ecosystems that will test the resilience of more species than we’ll ever count. (my bold)

"The history of life on Earth cannot be encapsulated as a balance sheet of losses and gains through time. Nor can our present moment be understood as different groups of creatures ceding the way for each other as life climbs the rungs of progress. The reality, like life itself, is messy. Comprehending what transpired 66 million years ago – or even in this moment – requires that we look beyond the details of what we can discern from a given species in isolation. Every fossil bone we uncover and carefully cradle in a museum grew from nutrition derived from other forms of prehistoric life; and those food sources, in turn, built their tissues from plants that took up essential components from the soils, enriched by the decay of yet other creatures that came before. Wherever we find life, one existence touches another, enmeshed and setting the conditions for what might appear tomorrow." (my bolds)

Comment: when God created evolution, He knew that His creation of the vast bush of life would be an enormous totally interlocking system of related ecosystems. The part of this essay I had to skip, describes the interplay of animal effects on how their activities effect every ecologic environment they live in. The bush is required as a positive modeling of the Earth and as a food supply for all living things, including humans. Everybody is everybody's food.