Inversion Principle

Greater You Are, Harder You Fall
The Age of Dinosaurs ended roughly 65 million years ago with the K-T or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, which killed off all dinosaurs save those that became birds, as well as roughly half of all species on the planet, including pterosaurs. The prime suspect in this ancient murder mystery is an asteroid or comet impact, which left a vast crater at Chicxulub on the coast of Mexico.

A series of colossal volcanic eruptions occurred between 63 million to 67 million years ago. These created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds in India, whose original extent may have covered as much as 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers), or more than twice the area of Texas.
Research suggests the mass extinction happened at or just after the biggest phase of the Deccan eruptions, which spewed 80 percent of the lava found at the Deccan Traps.
Both an impact from space and volcanic eruptions would have injected vast clouds of dust and other emissions into the sky, dramatically altering global climate and triggering die-offs. Double Trouble one might say.
"It's the first time we can directly link the main phase of the Deccan Traps to the mass extinction," said Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller.
"Before the mass extinction, most of the foraminifera species were comparatively large, very flamboyant, very specialized, very ornate, with many chambers," Keller explained. These foraminifera were roughly 200 to 350 microns large, or a fifth to a third of a millimeter long.
These showy foraminifera were very specialized for particular ecological niches.
"When the environment changed, as it did around K-T, that prompted their extinction," she added. "The foraminifera that followed were extremely tiny, one-twentieth the size of the species before, with absolutely no ornamentation, just a few chambers." As such, these puny foraminifera serve as very distinct tags of when the K-T extinction event started. (ack: live science.com)
Where foraminifera could adapt heavy dinosaurs could not. Their strength was their undoing.
benny

News On The March!

Bird by bird, the avian population is shrinking
Aug.24-The Christian Science Monitor*
“Earlier this summer, the National Audubon Society released a definitive study of population trends of North American birds, a monumental effort based on decades of Christmas bird counts and breeding bird surveys. The study confirms birds that were so familiar in New England – evening grosbeaks, eastern meadowlarks, northern bobwhites – are in free fall… The songs of tens of millions of birds have been silenced.
In one sense, extinction is hugely overrated. The vast majority of animals and plants that disappear hardly leave a ripple in the pool of life. Species become rare, they disappear.”
Yet is it a wonder if we should find the world about us has become grosser and in choice of our pleasures philistine? Our spiritual health is maintained not by some precepts mechanically learnt, by rote or by their observance. The beauties of Nature, her wild places and changing skies under the sun and moon that waxes and wanes, are as important. Just as a man’s development may well be measured in the influences of his childhood we as species owe to the richness of our environment that make some fossilized impression within us. These are counterweights to the accidents of life that are merely incidental or by chance.
One may read these impressions according to his temperament or by his beliefs. A Christian may say,”It is Gods blessing as I make of verse 28 from the opening chapter of Genesis.”
One thing is sure. Man who learnt to control nature and create in his image ought to have taken into account his soul as well. In the way he has overlooked the wonders of God's creation as symbolized in bob-white or sand-piper, he has shown himself to be a Caliban than the Son of God.
Once again to quote Nathaniel T Wheelwright, “The true loss is spiritual and aesthetic, not functional or economic. Life would go on if every Shakespeare play and Beethoven sonata were destroyed, but to use the words of the Audubon report, our skies would be "a little quieter and the landscape a little drabber." Of course, we'll always have CDs of bird song and DVDs of bird behavior to fall back on – a digital memory, as it were – but will that be enough?
I can see now our forefathers’ rite of passage was really about connecting us with the land. It was about learning how to become intimate with our world's signs, smells, sounds, textures and rhythms. It was about knowing where we are and who we are. How far we would be to be able to pass that gift on to our own grandchildren?”
• Nathaniel T. Wheelwright studies the behavioral ecology of birds and teaches biology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

benny