DailyDirt: Who Needs Dinosaurs Anyway?

Jurassic World raked in over a billion bucks in less than 2 weeks by digitally re-creating some enormous (and sometimes fictional) dinosaurs. A few folks are actually working on re-animating prehistoric animals and other ancient organisms, but do we really need to bring these species back? Perhaps we should work on preventing an artificially-created extinction event of our own before we try to reverse the effects of the last one?

• An impact event that left a 110-mile-wide crater off the Yucatan coast of Mexico is most likely the cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. That impact happened 66 million years ago, and it took a couple of million years for the ocean biosphere to recover its diversity afterwards. [url]
• A mass extinction occurring over 200 million years ago might have had a few contributing factors -- perhaps bacteria (aka methanosarcina) produced a world-changing amount of methane? Volcanoes might have also been a contributing factor, too, but we may never really be certain what actually happened that many millions of years ago. [url]
• We're headed for another mass extinction event, and the 'Sixth Great Extinction' is probably already underway. Species are dying off at a rate that's over 100 times higher than 'normal' -- are we only concerned when the next 'great extinction' also includes humans? [url]

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