Science of Discworld

THE DEATH OF DINOSAURS

LlFE TURNS UP EVERYWHERE IT CAN.

Life turns up everywhere it can't.

And just when it seems to have got itself going really comfortably, with a sustainable lifestyle and gradual progress towards higher things, along comes a major catastrophe and sets it back twenty million years. Yet, paradoxically, those same disasters also pave the way to radically new lifeforms ...

It's all rather confusing.

Life is resilient, but any particular species may not be. Life is constantly devising new tricks. The one with eggs is brilliant: pro­vide the developing embryo with its own personal life-support machine. Inside, the environment is tailored to the needs of that species, and what's outside doesn't matter much, because there's a barrier to keep it out.

Life is adaptable. It changes the rules of its own game. As soon as eggs make their appearance, the stage is set for the evolution of egg-eaters ...

Life is diverse. The more players there are, the more ways there are to make a living by taking in each others' washing.

Life is repetitious. When it finds a trick that works, it churns out thousands of variations on the same basic theme. The great biolo­gist John (J.B.S.) Haldane was once asked what question he would like to pose to God, and replied that he'd like to know why He has such an inordinate fondness for beetles.

There are a third of a million beetle species today, far more than in any other plant or animal group. In 1998 Brian Farrell came up with a possible answer to Haldane's query. Beetles appeared about 250 million years ago, but the number of species didn't explode until about 100 million years ago. That happens to be just when flowering plants came into existence. The 'phase space' avail­able for organisms suddenly acquired a new dimension, a new resource became available for exploitation. The beetles were beauti­fully poised to take advantage by eating the new plants, especially their leaves. It used to be thought that flowering plants and polli­nating insects drove each other to wilder and wilder diversity, but that's not true. However, it is true for beetles. Nearly half of today's beetle species are leaf-eaters. It's still an effective tactic.

Sometimes natural disasters don't just eliminate a species or two. The fossil record contains a number of 'mass extinctions' in which a substantial proportion of all life on Earth disappeared. The best-known mass extinction is the death of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

In order not to mislead you, we should point out at once that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of any dinosaur civ­ilization, no matter what events are going on in the Roundworld Project. But... whenever a scientist says 'there is no scientific evi­dence for', there are three important questions you should ask -especially if it's a government scientist. These are: 'Is there any evi­dence against?, 'Has anyone looked?', and 'If they did, would they expect to find anything?'

The answers here are 'no,' 'no', and 'no'. Deep Time hides a lot, especially when it's assisted by continental movement, the bulldoz­ing ice sheets, volcanic action and the occasional doomed asteroid. There are few surviving human artefacts more than ten thousand years old, and if we died out today, the only evidence of our civi­lization that might survive for a million years would be a few dead probes in deep space and various bits of debris on the Moon. Sixty-five million? Not a chance. So although a dinosaurian civilization is pure fantasy, or, rather, pure speculation, we can't rule it out absolutely. As for dinosaurs who were sufficiently advanced to use tools, herd other dinosaurs ... well, Deep Time would wash over them without a ripple.

Dinosaurs are always among the most popular exhibits at muse­ums. They remind us that the world wasn't always like it is now; and they remind us that humans have been on this planet for a very short time, geologically speaking. Basically, dinosaurs are ancient lizards. The ones whose bones we all go to gawp at in museums are rather big lizards, but many were much smaller. The name means 'terrible lizard', and anyone who watched Jurassic Park will under­stand why.

An Italian fossil collector who watched the Spielberg movie sud­denly realized that a perplexing fossil, filed away for years in his basement, might well be a bit of a dinosaur. He then sent it to a nearby university, where it was found not just to be a dinosaur, but a new species. It was a young therapod, small flesh-eating dinosaurs that are the closest relatives of birds. Interestingly, it did­n't have any feathers. A story straight out of the movies: narrative imperative at work in our own world ... traceable, as always, to selective reporting. How many fossil hunters owned a bit of dinosaur bone but didn't make the connection after seeing the movie?

In the human mind, dinosaurs resonate with myths about drag­ons, common to many cultures and many times; and many miles of suggestions have appeared to explain how the dragon-thoughts in our minds have come down to us, over millions of years of evolu­tion, from real dinosaur images and fears in the minds of our ancient ancestors. However, those ancestors must have been very ancient, for those of our ancestors that overlapped the dinosaurs were probably tiny shrewlike creatures that lived in holes and ate insects. After more than a hundred million years of success, the dinosaurs all died out, 65 million years ago, and the evidence is that their demise was sudden. Did proto-shrews have nightmares about dinosaurs, all that time ago? Could such nightmares have survived 65 million years of natural selection? In particular, do shrews today have nightmares about fire-breathing dragons, or is it just us? It seems likely that the dragon myth comes from other, less lit­eral, tendencies of that dark, history-laden organ that we call the human mind.

Dinosaurs exert a timeless fascination, especially for children. Dinosaurs are genuine monsters, they actually existed, and some of them, the ones we all know about, were gigantic. They are also safely dead.

Many small children, even if they are resistant to the standard reading materials in school, can reel off a long list of dinosaur names. 'Velociraptor' was not notable among them before Jurassic Park, but it is now. Those of us who still have an affection for the brontosaur often need to be reminded that for silly reasons science has deemed that henceforth that sinuous swamp-dwelling giant must be renamed the apatosaur. So attuned are we to the dinosaurs that the drama of their sudden disappearance has captured our imaginations more than any other bit of pakeontology. Even our own origins attract less media attention.

What about the sudden demise?

For a start, quite a few scientists have disputed that it ever was sudden. The fossil record implicates the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, as 'D-Day'. This was also the start of the so-called Tertiary period, or Age of Mammals, so the end of the dinosaurs is usually called the K/T boundary, 'K' because Germans spell Cretaceous with a K. But if we assume that the end of the Cretaceous was 'when it happened', then many species seemed to have anticipated their end by vanishing from the fossil record five to ten million years earlier. Did amorous dinosaurs, per­haps, say to each other 'It's just not worth going through with this reproduction business, dear, we're all going to be wiped out in ten million years.'? No. So why the fuzzy fade-out over millions of years? There are good statistical reasons why we might not be able to locate fossils right up to the end, even if the species concerned were still alive.

To set the remark in context: how many specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous dinosaur of all, do you think that the world's universities and museums have between them? Not copies, but originals, dug from the rock by palaeontologists? Hundreds ... surely?

No. Until Jurassic Park, there were precisely three, and the times when those particular animals lived have a spread of five million years. Three more fossilized T. rexes have been found since, because Jurassic Park gave dinosaurs a lot of favourable publicity, making it possible to drum up enough money to go out and find some more. With that rate of success, the chance of a future race finding any fossil humanoids, over the whole period of our and our ancestors' existence, would be negligible. So if some species had survived on Earth for a five million year period, it is entirely likely that no fos­sils of it will have been found, especially if it lived on dry land, where fossils seldom form. This may suggest that the fossil record isn't much use, but quite the contrary applies. Every fossil that we find is proof positive that the corresponding species did actually exist; moreover, we can get a pretty accurate impression of the grand flow of Life from an incomplete sample. One lizard fossil is enough to establish the presence of lizards, even if we've found only one species out of the ten thousand that were around.

Bearing this in mind, though, we can easily see that even if the death of the dinosaurs was extremely sudden, then the fossil record might easily give a different impression. Suppose that fossils of a given species turn up randomly about every five million years. Sometimes they're like buses, and three come along at once, that is, within a million years of each other. Other times, they're also like buses: you wait all day (ten million years) and don't see any at ail. During the ten million year run-up to the K/T boundary, you find random fossils. For some species, the last one you find is from 75 million years ago; for others it's from 70 million years ago. For a few, by chance, it's from 65 million years ago. So you seem to see a grad­ual fade-out.

Unfortunately, you'd see much the same if there really had been a gradual fade-out. How can you tell the difference? You should look at species whose fossils are far more common. If the demise was a sudden one, those ought to show a sharper cut-off. Species that live wholly or partially in water get fossilized more often, so the best way to time the K/T mass extinction is to look at fossils of marine species. Wise scientists therefore mostly ignore the dinosaur drama and fiddle around with tiny snails and other undrarnatic species instead. When they do, they find that ichthyosaurs also died out about then, as did the last of the ammonites and many other marine groups. So something sudden and dramatic really did hap­pen at the actual boundary, but there may well have been a succession of other events just before it too.

What kind of drama? An important clue comes from deposits of iridium, a rare metal in the Earth's crust. Iridium is distinctly more common in some meteorites, particularly those from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter So if you find an unusually rich deposit of iridium on Earth, then it may well have come from an impacting meteorite.

In 1979 the Nobel-winning physicist Luis Alvarez was musing along such lines, and he and his geologist son Walter Alvarez discovered a layer of clay that contains a hundred times as much irid­ium as normal. It was laid down right at the K/T boundary, and it can be found over the whole of the Earth's land mass. The Alvarezes interpreted this discovery as a strong hint that a meteorite impact caused the K/T extinction. The total amount of iridium in the layer is estimated to be around 200,000 tons (tonnes), which is about the amount you'd expect to find in a meteorite 6 miles (10 km) across. If a meteorite that size were to hit the Earth, travelling at a typical 10 miles per second (16 kps), it would leave an impact crater 40 miles (65 km) in diameter. The blast would have been equivalent to thousands of hydrogen bombs, it would have thrown enormous quantities of dust into the atmosphere, blanking out sun­light for years, and if it happened to hit the ocean, a better than 50/50 chance, it would cause huge tidal waves and a short-lived burst of superheated steam. Plants would die, large plant-eating dinosaurs would run out of food and die too, carnivorous dinosaurs would quickly follow. Insects would on the whole fare a little better, as would insect-eaters.

Much evidence has accumulated that the Chicxulub crater, a buried rock formation in the Yucatan region of southern Mexico, is the remnant of this impact. Crystals of Shocked' quartz were spread far and wide from the impact site: the biggest ones are found near the crater, and smaller ones are found half way round the world. In 1998 a piece of the actual meteorite, a tenth of an inch (2.5 mm) across, was found in the north Pacific Ocean by Frank Kyte. The fragment looks like part of an asteroid, ruling out a possible alternative, a comet, which might also create a similar crater. According to A. Shukolyukov and G.W. Lugmair, the proportions of chromium isotopes in K/T sediment confirm that view. And Andrew Smith and Charlotte Jeffery have found that mass die-backs of sea urchins which occurred at the K/T boundary were worst in the regions around central America, where we think the meteorite came down.

Although the evidence for an impact is strong, and has grown considerably over the twenty years since the Alvarezes first advanced their meteorite-strike theory, a strongly dissenting group of palaeontologists has looked to terrestrial events, not dramatic astronomical interference, to explain the K/T extinction. There was certainly a rapid series of climatic changes at the end of the Cretaceous, with very drastic changes of sea level as ice caps grew or melted. There is also good evidence that some seas, perhaps all, lost their oxygen-based ecology to become vast, stinking, black, anaerobic sinks. The fossil evidence for this consists of black iron-and sulphur-rich lines in sediments. The most dramatic terrestrial events were undoubtedly associated with the vulcanism which resulted in the so-called Deccan Traps, huge geological deposits of lava. The whole of Asia seems to have been covered with volcanoes, and they produced enough lava that it would have formed a layer 50 yards (45 m) thick if it had been spread over the whole continent. Such extensive vulcanism would have had enormous effects on the atmosphere; carbon dioxide emissions that warmed the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect, sulphur compounds resulting in terrible acid rain and freshwater pollution over the entire planet, and tiny rock particles blocking sunlight and causing 'nuclear winters' for decades at a time. Could the volcanoes that formed the Deccan Traps have killed the dinosaurs, instead of a meteorite? Much depends on the timing.

Our preferred theory, not because there is good independent evidence for it but because it would explain so much, and because it has a moral, is that the two causes are linked. The Chicxulub crater is very nearly opposite the Deccan Traps, on the other side of the planet. Perhaps volcanic activity in Asia began some millions of years before the K/T boundary, causing occasional ecological crises for the larger animals but nothing really final Then the meteorite hit, causing shockwaves which passed right through the Earth and converged, focused as if by a lens on just that fragile region of the planet's crust. (A similar effect happened on Mercury, where a gigantic impact crater called the Caloris Basin is directly opposite 'weird terrain' caused by focused shockwaves.)

There would then have been a gigantic, synchronized burst of vulcanism, on top of all the events of the collision, which would have been pretty bad on their own. The combination could have polished off innumerable animal species. In support of this idea, it should be said that another geological deposit, the Siberian Traps, contains ten times as much lava as the Deccan system, and it so hap­pens that the Siberian Traps were kid down at the time of another mass extinction, the great Permian extinction, which we mentioned earlier. To pile on further evidence: some geologists believe they have found another meteorite impact site in modern Australia, which in Permian times was opposite to Siberia.

The moral of this tale is that we should not look for 'the' cause of the dinosaur extinction. It is very rare for there to be just one cause of a natural event, unlike scientific experiments which are specially set up to reveal unique explanations.

On Discworld, not only does Death come for humans, scythe in hand, but diminutive sub-Deaths come for other animals, for example the Death of Rats in Soul Music, from whom a single, typ­ical quote will suffice: 'SQUEAK.'

The Death of Dinosaurs would have been something to see, with volcanoes in one hand and an asteroid in the other, trailing a cloak of ice ...

They were wonderfully cinematic reptiles, weren't they? Trust the wizards to get it wrong.

There is another lesson to be learned from our emphasis on the demise of the dinosaurs. Many other large and/or dramatic reptiles died out at the end of the Cretaceous, notably the plesiosaurs (famous as a possible 'explanation' of the mythical Loch Ness mon­ster), the ichthyosaurs (enormous fish-shaped predators, reptilian whales and dolphins), the pterosaurs (strange flying forms, of which the pterodactyls appear in all the dinosaur films and are labelled, wrongly, dinosaurs), and especially the mosasaurs .,.

Mosasaurs?

What were they? They were as dramatic as the dinosaurs, but they weren't dinosaurs. They didn't have as good a PR firm, though, because few non-specialists have heard of them. They are popularly known as fish-lizards, not as good a name as 'terrible lizard', and it describes them well. Some were nearly as fish-like as ichthyosaurs, or dolphins, some were rather crocodile-like, some were fifty-foot predators like the great white shark, some were just a couple of feet long and fed on baby ammonites and other common molluscs. They lasted a good twenty million years, and for much of that time they seem to have been the dominant marine predators. Yet most people meet the word in stories about dinosaurs, assume that the mosasaur was a not-very-interesting kind of dinosaur, and promptly forget them.

The other really strange thing about the K/T extinction, prob­ably not a 'thing' in any meaningful sense, because in this context a thing would be an equation of unknowns, whereas what we have is a diversity of related puzzles, is which creatures survived it. In the sea, the ammonites all died out, as did the other shelled forms like belemnites, unrolled ammonites, but the nautilus came through, as did the cuttlefish, squids, and octopuses. Amazingly the croco­diles, which to our eyes are about as dinosaur-like as you can get without actually being one, survived the K/T event with little loss of diversity. And those little dinosaurs called 'birds' came through pretty well unscathed. (There's a story here that we need to tell, quickly. Not so long ago, the idea that birds are the living remnants of the dinosaurs was new, controversial, and therefore a hot topic. Then it rapidly turned into the prevailing wisdom. New fossil dis­coveries, however, have shown conclusively that the major families of modern birds diverged, in an evolutionary sense, long before the K/T event. So they aren't remnants of the dinosaurs that otherwise died, they got out early by ceasing to be dinosaurs at all.)

Myths, not least Jurassic Park itself, have suggested that dinosaurs are not 'really' extinct at all. They survive, or so semi-fact semi-fic­tion accounts lead us to believe, in Lost World South American valleys, on uninhabited islands, in the depths of Loch Ness, on other planets, or more mystically as DNA preserved inside blood­sucking insects trapped and encased in amber. Alas, almost certainly not. In particular, 'ancient DNA' reportedly extracted from insects fossilized in amber comes from modern contaminants, not prehistoric organisms, at least if the amber is more than a hundred thousand years old.

Significantly, no one has made a film bringing back dodos, moas, pygmy elephants, or mosasaurs, only dinosaurs and Hitler are popular for the reawakening myth. Both at the same time would be a good trick.

Dinosaurs are the ultimate icon for an evolutionary fact which we generally ignore, and definitely find uncomfortable to think about: nearly all species that have ever existed are extinct. As soon as we realize that, we are forced to look at conservation of animal species in new ways. Does it really matter that the lesser spotted pogo-bird is down to its last hundred specimens, or that a hundred species of tree-snail on a Pacific island have been eaten out of exis­tence by predators introduced by human activity? Some issues, like the importation of Nile Perch into Lake Victoria in order to improve the game fishing, which has resulted in the loss of many hundreds of fascinating 'cichlid' fish species, are regretted even by the people responsible, if only because the new lake ecosystem seems to be much less productive. Everyone (except purveyors of bizarre ancient 'medicines', their even more foolish customers, and some unreconstructed barbarians) seems to agree that the loss of magnificent creatures like the great whales, elephants, rhinos and of course plants like ginkgoes and sequoias would be a tragedy. Nevertheless, we persist in reducing the diversity of species in ecosystems all around the planet, losing many species of beetles and bacteria with hardly any regrets.

From the point of view of the majority of humans, there are 'good' species, unimportant species, and 'bad' species like smallpox and mosquitoes, which we would clearly be better off without. Unless you take an extreme view on the 'rights' of all living crea­tures to a continued existence, you find yourself having to pass judgment about which species should be conserved. And if you do take such an extreme view, you've got a real problem trying to pre­serve the rights of cheetahs and those of their prey, such as gazelles. On the other hand, if you take the task of passing judgment seri­ously, you can't just assume that, say, mosquitoes are bad and should be eliminated. Ecosystems are dynamic, and the loss of a species in one place may cause unexpected trouble elsewhere. You have to examine the unintended consequences of your methods as well as the intended ones. When worldwide efforts were made to eradicate mosquitoes, with the aim of getting rid of malaria, the preferred route was mass sprayings of the insecticide DDT. For a time this appeared to be working, but the result in the medium term was to destroy all manner of beneficial insects and other creatures, and to produce resistant strains of mosquitoes which if anything were worse than their predecessors. DDT is now banned world­wide, which unfortunately doesn't stop some people continuing to use it.

In the past, the environment was a context for us, we evolved to suit it. Now we've become a context for the environment, we change it to suit us. We need to learn how to do that, but going back to some imaginary golden age in which primitive humans allegedly lived in harmony with nature isn't the answer. It may not be politi­cally correct to say so, but most primitive humans did as much environmental damage as their puny technology would allow. When humans came to the Americas from Siberia, by way of Alaska, they slaughtered their way right down to the tip of South America in a few tens of thousands of years, wiping out dozens of species, giant tree sloths and mastodons (ancient elephants, like mammoths but different), for example. The Anasazi Indians in the southern part of today's USA cut down forests to build their cliff dwellings, creating some of the most arid areas of the United States. The Maoris killed off the moas. Modern humans may be even more destructive, but there are more of us and technology can amplify our actions. Nevertheless, by the time humans were able to articulate the term 'natural environment', there wasn't one. We had changed the face of continents, in ways big and small.

To live in harmony with nature, we must know how to sing the same song as nature. To do that, we must understand nature. Good intentions aren't enough. Science might be, if we use it wisely.