Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
9
A WHIMPER OR A BANG?
We really hadn't been looking at the record in enough
detail to pick this extinction up, and we weren't disposed
to look at it as a catastrophe.
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Leo Hickey
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t is easy to say that 70 percent of all living species became extinct
at the K-T boundary, but what does it really mean? Who, and how
many, died? Remember that with the exception of species, the taxo-
nomic groupings established by biologists and paleontologists have
no inherent meaning—they are just one of many ways of organizing
flora and fauna. Phyla, families, groups, and genera do not die; they
are artificial constructs of the human mind. Only living individuals
die. How many have to do so before too few breeding pairs (if that
is the way they do it) are left to allow a species to survive? Although
we cannot be sure of the answer, the family hamster provides a
familiar (too familiar?) example. David Carlisle has stated that as far
as we know, "every golden hamster now alive is descended from a
single pregnant female trapped in Syria early in this century."
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In the
case of the ubiquitous hamster, survival did not even require a pair!
Try to imagine, if you are willing, what it would take to exterminate
Homo sapiens.
Only a few couples surviving in caves or in remote
regions near the poles might carry us through, to begin again, as in
Walter Miller's classic,
A Canticle for Leibowitz?
To truly eliminate
our species, would not nearly every human being on earth have to
die?
This repugnant thought experiment and the hamster example
may lend some credibility to Carlisle's claim that 99.99 percent of
all individuals of every species alive before the K-T boundary—
including individuals of the species that survived
—died in the K-T
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