It is taken as absolute fact both that the dinosaurs were mighty, and that they went extinct. These two things may seem difficult to reconcile, save for the deus ex machina of the asteroid's sudden arrival.
The previous four global mass extinction events were even more devastating to wildlife. While the asteroid of the fifth mass extinction wiped out "only" 75% of species, the previous four mass extinctions each wiped out closer to 90 or even 99% of all species of life on earth.
We are now firmly in the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction event. It's difficult to gain perspective from the inside, but each extinction event has historically taken place over about 10,000 years. In 2021 alone, scientists have declared 22 animal species and one plant species extinct. The UN has declared that our current rate of extinction is "at least tens to hundreds of times higher" than past extinctions.
This explains why biodiversity is one of the two planetary boundaries most heinously crossed (along with biogeochemical flows of nitrogen). Climate change is getting a lot of current attention, as it should, but not at the expense of awareness of the earth's plummeting biodiversity.
I spent today at a fossil museum at the Badland National Park in South Dakota, USA. This place is called "the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology in the American West" and for good reason. The staggering geological formations erode 10,000 times more quickly than stone mountains do, at a rate of about an inch per year. This means that casual visitors to the park are quite likely to spot a newly-emerging rare fossil. In 2010, a 7-year-old girl from Georgia, USA, discovered a museum-quality 32-million-year-old skull of a sabertooth cat. There are no dinosaurs here, as it was underwater in dino times, but the Badlands National Park is astonishing in its displays of early and extinct mammals.
They seem like creatures from a fantasy film- a three-toed horse only as tall as your knee, a fearsome 5-foot-tall pig creature that was a top predator, something that looks like a rhino with a forked horn but is actually more closely related to the modern horse. Dinosaurs in museums seem like dusty fact, far removed from modern reality. These early mammals, however, seem like what-ifs, an alternate universe that literally disintegrated to make space for this one. They also seem like warnings.
If small horses and giant pigs and forked rhino horses are things of the past, then how long until our current horses and pigs and rhinos are also things of the past? If even T-rex could not withstand extinction, then what makes us think that giraffes will? Or dogs? Or bluebirds? If our rate of extinction continues to be hundreds of times more than it has ever been, all while we're distracted by climate change, then we may perhaps save the planet but at a mighty cost.
The hope we have is that it is easy for one person to make a difference, right now, today. A major factor in extinctions is habitat loss, and one individual can certainly create habitat by planting native plants, or volunteering with a local ecological restoration group, or even just by following #homegrownnationalpark on social media. Creating habitat is incredibly rewarding- there are quick returns in seeing a resurgence of animal life in native plantings, or experiencing the joy of walking through a nature preserve that you personally helped to improve, or finding the community and camaraderie of like-minded conservationists across global social media.
We can make a difference. We can slow the rate of extinctions. And the time is now.