Some of the fieldwork that I've done with friends and colleagues of mine in Europe has identified some of the first very tantalizing clues of those dinosaur ancestors living soon after that terrible extinction at the end of the Permian. And these are in many ways very meager clues because they are not nice, beautiful, complete skeletons like you might see in a museum. But they aretiny little footprints and handprints, just a few centimeters long. And we find them in Poland and these little footprints, they were made about 249, 250 million years ago. They were made by these
And if what you're counting on is some technological silver bullet, you have to imagine that it's going to be-- if it hasn't been invented already, Extinction Rebellion in the UK has gotten a conservative parliament to declare a climate emergency and commit to zero carbon by 2050, which is not as fast as I
So if you have questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Extinction Rebellion will start to do this.
I'm a physicist, not a cartoonist. Extinction is the norm for life.
So big enough crater to account for a mass extinction , maybe a layer of Iridium like you find in the dinosaur extinction , shock quartz, anything that would indicate there was a big impact at any of these other mass extinctions .They did not find it for the end Triassic, or the end Permian, or the late Devonian, or the end Ordovician.
long time even though there's very little of it I know people have different views about that and then extinction that we have species extinction issues around the fact that these three topics our land our water in our air are fundamentally and profoundlyaffected by our patterns of energy is soul and I'll just pick one example out of each of these columns but on the land
environment languages can be brought back from the actual you know edge of extinction yeah exactly there are wellthat's never got to the point that like Cornish did for example because there's
Why? Forest restoration alone is estimated to be able to prevent up to 60% of expected species extinctions , to improve food security for over a billion people, and to remove 30% of excess carbonin the atmosphere. And that's just forests.
that we've hinted at with this record. And extinction 's final, too.
before, five times, in fact. Great extinction waves saw the earth nearly sterilized of life. Most recently, 66 million years ago, when a six mile wide asteroid slammed into what is now the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than during pre-human times.
And every time you speak to one of these experts they're correct when you look, I mean we've got like 50 years to, at most hundred years, to repair our ecosystem before we go extinct, literally extinction . If insects disappeared from our planet today life would flourish in five years. If human beings, sorry, if human beings disappeared from our planet life would flourish.
the point where you know and this a lot of people don't realize this but Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct so what does that mean commercial Extinction it means they're not extinct there are probably in the world I've heard estimates anywhere that range from half a million to a million and a half wild Atlantic salmon left in the world um but it's not worth it to go fishing for them you spend more calories
literally unable to give tickets away we're hemorrhaging red ink teetering from week to week on the edge of extinction imagine all that and then imagine that a player comes along a one-of-a-kind player with the unprecedented skill to throw the forward pass
that we've hinted at with this record. And extinctions do this, right?
And that is kind of-- after movies like "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," I think a lot of the general public sort of took this message and thought, OK, mass extinctions have to do with asteroid impacts. But the reason I wrote the book is because in the last 30 years, I thought there this really interesting story going on in geology,
Earth, it burnt its way through all the rocks. And that released unholy amounts of carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases that warmed the atmosphere, led to runaway global warming and that caused an extinction , and not just any extinction , but the granddaddy of all mass extinctions , 90 or 95% of all species died out. But there were a few plucky survivors, and among those survivors were some small little reptiles that had long arms and legs that could move fast, that were agile, that were smart, and is in those reptiles that we find the roots of the dinosaur family tree.
small, while they were still the size of humans and horses, it was then that they were developing these larger brains and keener senses. So it seems that being smart may have helped Tyrannosaurs endure this middle-cretaceous extinction . Now, how did hunt though? That's a question that a lot of paleontologists have wrestled with. And these are difficult questions to answer, frankly. But there is some evidence that Tyrannosaurs were pack hunters. And that is different than how they're often depicted in films as these solitary murderers. Now, the evidence
And all the bite marks are on one bone, the humerus, the upper arm bone. the mass extinction event.
And yet modern extinction rates are estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times greater than the natural baseline rate.
big one was the extinction rate fact. So just know that we are facing this. It's
And that's an extinction strategy.
You can imagine this as a diversity or a branching pattern of the diversity of life. And you get an extinction , you get a pruning of that tree, if you will, a clipping. So that red line might be the mass extinction .
And all the subsequent effects of this asteroid, including material raining back to the Earth and super heating the atmosphere, changes in the chemistry of the oceans, led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, alongside many, many other things. And this moment recalibrates the direction of life 66 million years ago.
We were able to get a-- plants are a good proxy for temperature, and what we noticed is, we found three distinct warming intervals after the mass extinction . And what we're able to do then is tie this all together, to see how these plant ecosystems were changing alongside the larger and larger mammals and all
Making it an extinction level event so that we had to be talking about colonies.
Possible outcome is extinction of the tuna.
There's extinction , which is well known as cry it out.
for the next 135 million years. So right over the extinction , you see dinosaurs get huge, and they fill all the niches that they would come on-- like go on to fill . This is called the Carolina Butcher.
Well, you can buy my book and find out. So the first mass extinction is the end Ordovician. So this is-- the Earth looked totally different.
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. So if de-extinction is about increasing biodiversity, then maybe it's a form of conservation.
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And de-extinction won't stop with the birth of the first healthy de-extinct animal.
So that was "Racing Extinction ." But the film-- when you do it normal Hollywood film,
And in "Racing Extinction ," we had premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival-- I think it was like the year before last
But go see "Racing Extinction ." You can get it on iTunes, Amazon, or you can order it from Discovery.
a mass extinction of species.
had alive back from extinction ?
But de-extinction , in order to get them back, does require DNA.
Phase 2 of de-extinction -- is probably even harder than what we've been able to accomplish so far.
So de-extinction , can we do it?
We look at premature extinction , which is happening at a much more rapid rate, caused by us.
It was an extinction level event for like-- well, let's put it this way.
The most recent mass extinction that you've probably all heard about is the one that destroyed most of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when an asteroid smashed
When a mass extinction happens, as I mentioned, it's not like Snowball Earth where it takes a really long time and there's
And the worst mass extinction that ever happened was 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian period.
What is the sixth extinction ?
During a mass extinction , he's written, vast swaths of the tree are cut short as if attacked by a crazed, axe-wielding madman.
And that is the extinction event that did in the dinosaurs and a lot of other groups at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
into-- the sixth extinction is obviously a pretty serious claim.
to total extinction . Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose carefully." So there's the percentage increased population in the world's population, it's almost halved