Anthroposaurus
We are Indifferent to the Fate of the Earth
Abstract
Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999
People could survive their natural trouble all right if it weren’t for the trouble they make for themselves.
Lessons in Extinction
A Charig, in his book, A New Look at the Dinosaurs, listed 30 likely causes of dinosaur extinction. He then listed less likely causes—poison gases, volcanic dust, meteorites, comets, sunspots and wars. Yet today, one of these, the meteorite or comet theory, is accepted by many as the unequivocal cause of the Cretaceous terminal event. An unlikely solution has become a certain solution. Why shouldn’t it change again and favor instead poison gases and wars?
Perhaps the seeds of change are already germinating. Robert Bakker, we saw, is one of the authorities who do not accept the asteroid idea. Beverley Halstead of Reading University, England, who died in a road accident, was another.
Halstead had a brilliant but outrageous reputation. He once perched for a photograph naked in a tree, his genitals dangling below him. He also shocked and amused dinosaur enthusiasts at a conference by demonstrating with his girlfriend how dinosaurs could copulate despite their long tails. And Halstead believed that late Cretaceous dinosaurs did need help in reproducing—only twelve species remained when the end came.
Dinosaurs were already virtually extinct and had been in decline for five million years before the supposed fall of the asteroid.
Professor Anthony Hallam of Birmingham University, England, denies that an asteroid struck at all. Having closely examined the strata in the boundary layer, he believes that the iridium had been laid down over thousands of years, not a few months as a cosmic collision demanded. If the decline of the dinosaurs was associated with the iridium deposits, it was certainly not a sudden event.
What does seems indisputable is that many of the mechanisms of extinction reviewed in the last chapter and expected of a cosmic collision sound uncomfortably close to what we see about us today, the result of high technology and too many human beings demanding too much of the earth’s resources with no thought of the consequences.
I have argued that the dinosaurs had the wherewithal to become intelligent. Did one species of dinosaur gradually kill off the others and finally itself?
Wilford doesn’t think so:
Wondrous as they were the dinosaurs were limited. They were incapable of causing their own extinction, or of foreseeing and preventing it.
Yet today we are in the midst of a mass extinction before which that of the late Cretaceous seems to pale. Ecologist Norman Myers in his book, The Sinking Ark, warns:
Basic processes of evolution are being altered more drastically than since the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs, and possibly more than since the emergence of life’s diversity.
In the future, would our descendants or another intelligent species wonder about the mass extinctions at the end of the Tertiary? Would they notice our little conceit, the Quaternary—it would be only millimeters thick, like the K-T boundary layer? Would they realize that the extinctions had been caused by just one species, either deliberately or through carelessness?
Our record proves that we are killers. Perhaps the anthroposaurs were also.
We began killing other species a long time ago—and not just for food. Although mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses had survived several periods of intense cold in previous cold phases of the present ice age, only at the end of the last one did they go extinct. A variety of catastrophic explanations for this have been suggested but, more likely is the simple explanation that they were hunted down by man.
The Miocene period of about 20 million years ago was the age of the apes. Today only five species, including man, remain. Only man is populous. Don Johanson and Maitland Edey say we are responsible for the disasters that have recently overtaken all modern apes. Carl Sagan is more explicit:
Humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who have displayed signs of intelligence… We may have been the agents of natural selection in suppressing the intellectual competition.
We have confined the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan and the gibbon to narrow areas and within our lifetime they could be extinct. We will have murdered our intellectual rivals.
More obvious intellectual rivals had already been disposed of by our ancestors.
The dismembered remains of 50 adult giant baboons and several juveniles were unearthed at Olongesailie in South West Kenya. With them were hundreds of chipped stones from a site 20 miles away. Clues that tool users brandishing weapons killed these animals comes from the presence of percussion flakes from toolmaking and cut marks on the bones. Baboons are powerful animals. With their strong jaws they do not need to make stone tools. They also live in bands. The hunter that had disposed of them must have been skillful and far from cowardly. He apparently had only primitive tools to face ferocious troops of giant baboons. The hunter was the first true man, Homo erectus—the giant baboon is long extinct.
Anthropologists have found stone tool fragments alongside Australopithecus remains suggesting that A.africanus was the tool maker. But the stone flakes are the same as those made by Homo erectus. The implements found with the australopithecine bones were discarded by Homo erectus after dinner. The australopithecines were extinct 1.4 million years ago, caught between the predatory attentions of Homo who found them easy game (just as slow as Homo was himself and too unsophisticated to defend themselves adequately) and the baboons who had no particular predatory intentions but competed more successfully for food.
About two million years ago mammalian evolution went into overdrive and the number of genera of mammals trebled in the next million years. The diversity of mammals peaked about one million years ago. Since then it has continuously declined as mankind became increasingly dominant. Most mammals other than domestic animals will be extinct within decades.
Compare it with the Cretaceous. Bakker writes:
It took no more than two million years—maybe much less—to exterminate the dinosaurs.
The prehistory of mankind has many examples of apparently unnecessary killing. Were men even in those early days as insensitive to other species as they appear to be today?
At the foot of a limestone cliff at Solutre, France, was a 50 feet deep mound of horse bones, killed by prehistoric man. Dr Sandra Olsen of the John Hopkins Medical Institute, Baltimore, examined the remains of animals killed by early man on sites like this, 35,000 years old, and showed that only seven of 3000 bones, mainly reindeer, had cut marks on them caused by butchery. So few signs of cutting could only signify that prehistoric men had not killed these animals primarily for meat. The experts decided they had killed for delicacies—liver and intestines. Maybe. Or maybe they just killed for fun! Maybe they got high on the smell of death. At any rate the slaughter continued for 25,000 years.
Carl Sagan tells us:
Shortly after man entered North America via the Bering Straits there were massive and spectacular kills of large game animals, often by driving them over cliffs.
Like their contemporaries at Solutre, these emergent men used the same technique, but thousands of miles away. Mass carnage was widespread and effective.
Civilization does not seem to alter us. Quite the opposite! Humans have savagely hunted down the animals with which they share the globe since they discovered technical ways of compensating for their puny bodies. In historic times humans have exterminated many varieties of animals and birds, though some of them, like the bison, existed in vast numbers.
Myers highlights the rapidly increasing rate of destruction as technology has improved:
As a primitive hunter, man proved himself capable of eliminating species. From the year AD 1600, however, he became able, through advancing technology, to over-hunt animals to extinction in just a few years.
The rate of extinction of species of mammals and birds (not counting lesser creatures and plants) increased from one every four years from 1600 to 1900 AD to one every year in most of the present century. By 1974 writers in Science magazine considered that 1000 species of all kinds were becoming extinct every year. If the tropical forests are substantially cleared “by the end of the century we shall have lost one million species, possibly many more. Except for the barest handful, they will have been eliminated by the hand of man” (Myers).
This compares with estimates of one species every 1000 years during the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, though the latter must be a serious underestimation because very many species existed—and died—without leaving any remains. Millions of creepy crawlies must have died without trace—and plants. And, for those we do know about, there must also be some degree of averaging over a long time period of much more sudden extinction events because of the generally poor resolution of time in old rocks. When the time resolution is better because deposition was copious, we find that extinction in the Cretaceous could occur extraordinarily rapidly—for some species at least.
J Smit and J Hertogen found that there were no significant changes in the deposits of foraminifera species for over 600 feet in the K-T boundary layer, representing millions of years in time, but they disappeared in a fraction of an inch representing “about 200 years”. Mankind’s ability to kill off marine and aquatic species in bulk has developed since the start of the industrial revolution about 200 years ago.
In addition to the wanton destruction of species, human proliferation has created a huge imbalance in faunal variety illustrated by the huge human biomass of 250 million tons—probably greater than that of any other animal species. And, besides the six billion human animals, there are their domesticated animals—three billion domestic herbivores. What we see is a reduction of species variety together with an increase in actual numbers of some animals. That is just what happened at the end of the Cretaceous.
A large predator will not hunt mice. The reward is not worth the effort. Nor would men be expected to bother with small prey. The pattern of extinctions of mammals in the last million years shows that so far 50 per cent of large mammals have gone but only two per cent of small mammals have. This too is similar to the extinctions at the time of the dinosaurs. But if mankind did not hunt them, why have some small mammals died out?
Effects tend to knock on. Norman Owen Smith of Witwatersrand University in South Africa, has proposed that overhunting, which caused the extinction of the larger herbivores, led also to the loss of open ground. The lack of the herds allowed the bush to grow in to the grasslands again. Since the smaller herbivores, which lacked the size to keep the forests at bay, were also disadvantaged by the spreading bush, they also lost ground and became extinct. Thus although mankind did not hunt the smaller animals his overhunting of the larger ones indirectly caused the downfall of some of the others.
But some opportunistic small species like the sparrow and the rat make a virtue of the environment created by man. The same thing happened in the Cretaceous when birds and some inconspicuous rat-like creatures thrived in the disruption of the environment created by the anthroposaurs, and then survived their demise to colonize the world—the birds and our ancestors, the primitive mammals.
A future student of the rocks, looking back on the terminal extinction at the end of the Tertiary would see extinctions starting much sooner in Europe and Africa than in the Americas. Diversity would seem to continue for longer in South America where man did not arrive until much later.
In the Triassic the dinosaurs of Asiamerica were diverse and abundant but elsewhere they seemed static and conservative. Could that suggest that the primitive but emerging anthroposaur did not get to Asiamerica until late but that his unwelcome attentions held back the evolution of species elsewhere from an earlier time?
Many of the main theories of the death of the dinosaurs boil down to the effect of pollution, the source of which was impacts with asteroids or erupting volcanoes. Maybe the truth was more mundane—the anthroposaurs drowned themselves and their planet in their own waste, just as we are doing!
Pollution is a symptom of increasing entropy, a scientific measure of disorder. By creating greater order in constructing themselves, lifeforms reduce entropy within their bodies and perhaps in their immediate surroundings but in so doing they vastly increase entropy in the world at large. The more such creatures there are, the more disorder, the more entropy, they create. When the entropy of their world gets too high they die.
Entropy is waste. Organisms trapped in a sealed environment with plenty of food quite often poison themselves to death on their own waste. A ferment of home brew will stop working even though there is plenty of sugar and nutrient left. The yeast is poisoned by the alcohol that it makes as waste. The anthroposaurs poisoned themselves on their waste. We are doing the same. The earth is effectively a sealed environment and if we fill it with waste products we shall die.
Entropy is sewage. Sewage destroys life in surface water as bacteria decompose it into carbon dioxide thus removing dissolved oxygen. More oxygen can dissolve in the water from the air but, when sewage pollution is heavy, replacement can be a lot slower than consumption. The oxygen gets used up and life in the polluted water dies of suffocation. In inland and shallow continental seas, the leaching out of soluble inorganic fertilizers like nitrates and phosphates adds to this effect. They promote the growth of surface algae in unpleasant masses, blocking light from the water below and adding to the oxygen demand when they decay.
Entropy is acid rain. The final Cretaceous atmosphere was acidic. The source of the acidity, we are told, was either volcanic emissions or the formation of nitrogen oxides as the death star burned its way through the air prior to impact. Dramatic! Reality could have been as commonplace and stupid as it is today. Anthroposaurs pouring acid into their environment, as we are doing, would not have survived long. Greenland core analysis shows that the air today is four times more acid than it was in the 16th century. This modest ratio disguises the fact that local levels close to the source of the acidity were much higher.
Moreover, the pH scale of acidity is logarithmic not linear. This means that a change in pH of one unit from say 6 to 5 represents an increase in acidity on a linear scale of ten times: every unit reduction in pH is another ten fold increase in acidity. Rain which has fallen in the industrial parts of the world tested to be pH 4 is a thousand times more acidic than pure water which is pH 7.
But it is not only the acidity itself that causes damage. The geographical extent of the acid damaged forests in Germany increased from eight per cent to more than 50 per cent in only a few years. Though this loss of forest is distressing enough, the main danger to higher animals comes from the acid leaching out the salts of heavy metals, which then poison the ground water.
Entropy is pollution by heavy metals. Each metal has a threshold level of acidity below which it remains bound in the soil but beyond which its salts dissolve into the water. According to Bernhard Ulrich, a West German chemist, toxic aluminium ions begin to be released from the soil into the water when the pH reaches 4.2. Aluminium is now being linked with senile dementia, Altzheimer’s disease. Did the dinosaurs suffer from premature senile dementia caused by acid rain?
How are we creating this acidity? Mainly through industry: burning fossil fuels and sintering metalliferous ores to extract the metals. The by-product is sulphur dioxide, a noxious gas that eventually turns into sulfuric acid, one of the most corrosive mineral acids. The top ten sulphur dioxide polluting countries in the world in 1980 were emitting 100 million tons of sulphur dioxide a year. If anthroposaurs reached an advanced society they must have added acids to the air and thence to the groundwater. It takes 5000 years for the world’s groundwater to replenish. If it became a poisonous soup of acid and heavy metal ions, it would be 5000 years before it became usable again. Even in the Cretaceous, with its higher rainfall, it could have remained polluted for 1000 years. The poisoning of the earth’s groundwater could be a very effective way of initiating a mass extinction.
Plenty of heavy metals are associated with the end of the Cretaceous and the death of the dinosaurs. The experts say they came from metal bearing meteorites or local volcanoes. But if human beings are anything to go by, an intelligent creature can easily produce enough heavy metals to pollute the environment without having to resort to natural causes. Nature causes 325,000 tons of copper to leach into the world’s water supply every year, but humanity annually extracts 7.5 million tons of copper and most of that will finish up as waste. The figure is increasing.
Cores from the Arctic ice cap show that lead in the air is now 500 times its natural level, the increase having principally occurred since the industrial revolution. Lead is a cumulative poison—it is stored in the body until danger levels are exceeded. Our own bodies contain more than 1000 times more lead than our recent ancestors. Lead poisons the nervous system and the brain by interfering with enzymes. Young minds are particularly affected. The symptoms, at dosages that may well be far below the official toxicity level, are distractibility, impatience, frustration, restlessness, impulsiveness, destructiveness and violence—symptoms typical of the behavior of much of our urban youth!
The clay band of the Alverez’s does not only contain iridium; it is full of heavy metals. Other metals in the boundary layer at abundances higher than normal are osmium, palladium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, selenium, nickel and tin. These metals are not only found in extra-terrestrial sources. Terrestrial sources such as copper-nickel ores and molybdenum sulfide ores also contain many of these unusual metals, concentrated naturally by molecular filtration which traps the metal in the crystal lattice of the basic material of the ore. But such mechanisms occur in particular localities and cannot account for a worldwide distribution.
If, though, these metal ores had been mined, smelted and processed to get at the copper, nickel or molybdenum, the flue gases would have carried off the remaining metals to pollute the environment widely. The concentration of the metals in the boundary layer varies from place to place just as one would expect from sites that might have been close to, or distant from, an industrial area. Furthermore ores from different sources, processed in different places, would have had different compositions so the analysis of the boundary layer in different places would be expected to vary as researchers have found. A death star would have a fixed composition and would distribute its components fairly uniformly. Death stars may be more romantic but common industrial pollution fits the description better.
When heavy metals are around, the natural responses of the earth can make things worse. Professor Frederick Challenger of Leeds University, England, has shown that organisms rid themselves of unwanted or poisonous elements by converting them into their methyl derivatives which, being volatile, disperse into the atmosphere. Marine algae get rid of mercury, lead, antimony and arsenic in this way, not to mention sulphur and iodine in large quantities. Dispersion of the latter elements is beneficial to organisms on land since without it they would suffer from sulphur or iodine deficiency. But methylated heavy metals are very toxic.
Methyl mercury was the agent of severe poisoning at Minimata in Japan where, for many years, a factory discharged mercury wastes into a bay which provided seafood for the local people. In the West farmers using organic fungicidal dressings on their seeds get better yields because the grain does not rot in the ground. They also poison thousands of birds. The fungicides contain mercury.
Historians suspect that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning from the arsenic salts used as a pigment in his bedroom wallpaper on St Helena. Fungi growing on the damp walls disposed of the unwanted arsenic by converting it into volatile methyl derivatives which the would-be emperor inhaled, slowly poisoning himself.
The authorities have banned a similar compound of tin used in an anti-fouling paint for boats because it causes genetic damage in shellfish.
Entropy is chemical pollution. Companies in the USA use over 60,000 chemicals and more than 13,000 of them are known to cause genetic damage. In the modern world dangerous poisons are bandied about like confetti, and supposedly all in a good cause. For every human being on earth, the world’s farmers apply a pound of pesticides to their crops every year.
H.K.Erben of Bonn University noticed that the eggshells of the species of dinosaur he was studying got thinner in more recent deposits. Pesticides like DDT and polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs) harm animals at the top of a food chain by absorbing into body fats and accumulating in the predator as it eats its prey. If sufficient accumulates at some point in the chain, the animal suffers physiological damage leading to death. Predatory birds, like eagles, have suffered notably. Their eggs become so thin and brittle they break in the nest. Bakker classifies birds as living dinosaurs!
Cancer-causing PCBs are never found in nature but are found in the bodies of 99 per cent of Americans. The sperm count of the American male is only half its value in 1940. The reason why is not known. What is known is that in the same period increasing amounts of organochlorine compounds have been found in sperm. Organochlorine chemicals kill pests so why shouldn’t they kill sperm? An expert tells us that dinosaurs died out because mammals killed and ate their young: another tells us that their young were all born the same sex. What if their young were not born at all because pesticides had sterilized all the males? Do our manufacturers and governments care if pesticides sterilize the human race?
Though PCBs are still widely used, advanced countries have banned DDT but still manufacture it for export to other, mainly Third World countries!
Every year industry dumps 250 million metric tons of dangerous waste that can “cause cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, nervous disorders, blood diseases and permanent, possibly fatal, damage to the liver, kidneys or genes,” according to James Bellini.
But dangerous quantities don’t have to be large. Daily each of us takes in one millionth of an ounce of vinyl chloride mainly from PVC. But Italian researcher, Cesari Maltoni, has demonstrated that only one part in a million of vinyl chloride causes mammary tumors in rats, and only 25 parts in a million causes cancers of the liver. Those are single doses. Continuous exposure to doses of only one tenth of these levels have similar effects.
Farmers bathe the land with chemicals. Many have the simpleton’s philosophy that, if a little fertilizer is good, a lot must be better. They pollute the water table, waste their money and destroy the quality of the soil. Loss of quality, through loss of fine particles, organic matter and water, reduces rooting depth which, paradoxically, results in less fertility. Poor quality soil coheres badly and therefore erodes more easily. David Pimentel, Professor of Entomology and Agricultural Science at Cornell University says that loss of soil depth is seriously reducing food production. The US is losing soil at seven tons an acre each year; a third of the topsoil has been lost in only two centuries of farming.
Because of overuse of fertilizers our lakes and rivers suffer from eutrophication. Prolific growths of algae and photosynthetic bacteria, thriving on the excess nutrients washed out of the soil, suffocate everything else by their excessive oxygen demand as they decompose. Organic deposits forms thick layers on the bottom, quite unable to be oxidized but eventually metamorphosed by anaerobic bacteria and then pressure to yield hydrocarbons.
Our main oil deposits today were laid down in the Late Cretaceous. Oil was originally formed in shallow, stagnant lakes or seas on continental shelves. The conditions were those of eutrophication. Did the stagnant waters of the lakes and shallow seas polluted by the anthroposaurs provide the conditions for the formation of the Cretaceous oil deposits? Perhaps a close analysis of the original oil bearing rocks will give us some indication of how polluted the environment was and where the pollutants originated from, whether excessive amounts of silt were brought down, and whether it has any characteristics that show the soil had been cultivated. Our farmers and industrialists are setting up suitable conditions. Could we, in such places as the Great Lakes and the Baltic Sea be initiating the next phase of petroleum formation?
The “greenhouse effect” is another recurrent theme in the demise of the dinosaurs. The planet certainly got warmer. From the ratios of oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 in limestone laid down at the time of the K-T boundary layer, the ocean temporarily warmed by between one and five degrees Celsius then a long term cooling set in.
Most climatologists expect major changes in our climate during the next fifty to one hundred years. The concentrations of greenhouse gases in the air are increasing and the temperature of the earth is rising at a corresponding rate. In 1985 scientists released figures based on the analysis of air trapped in polar ice sheets. The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 270 parts per million (ppm) by volume from the 15th century till the beginning of the 20th century, enough to keep the temperature of the earth comfortable rather than the -25 degrees Celsius it would be without it. Since then it has risen to 350 ppm by volume in less than a century.
Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Over the last 300 years the amount in the air has doubled and it is now increasing at a steady rate of one per cent per annum.
The UN Environmental Protection Agency in 1984 tentatively predicted a rise of five degrees Celsius by 2100 AD. Tom Widgley of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, England, calculates that the natural greenhouse effect will have doubled by 2027 at the latest. Temperatures would rise between two and four degrees as a consequence.
The direct effect of greenhouse heating is that water will evaporate faster: it will have less time to penetrate into the soil and more water will evaporate from rivers, streams and lakes. Consequently the water table will fall and the land will get much drier. Climate will be more continental with hotter, drier summers and colder, harsher winters. Extended land masses, including the wheat growing areas of the US and the former USSR, will become more arid—the bigger the land area, the more pronounced the effect. A rise of only four degrees Celsius could destroy the wheat producing areas.
In contrast lands adjacent to ocean margins, especially where there are mountains, will be exposed to very heavy rainfall due to the high evaporation from the warm sea surface.
A warmer planet will mean that the permafrost of Siberia and Canada will melt releasing methane trapped there forming a positive feedback loop pushing temperature higher still. A rise of four degrees Celsius might be enough to start to melt the polar icecaps. The reflectivity of the earth near the poles will fall, more heat will be absorbed and another disastrous positive feedback loop will form accelerating the melting. The icecaps contain 98 per cent of the earth’s fresh water and could lift sea levels by 160 feet. The rise could be even greater because the earth beneath the Antarctic would rise as the weight of ice was released from it displacing even more water.
Besides fossil fuels burnt for energy the main source of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is the destruction of forests for grazing. The tropical wet forests cover almost 10 million square miles and keep vast amounts of carbon bound up that would otherwise be atmospheric carbon dioxide. Yet satellite photographs show that farmers are clearing 0.5 per cent of these forests each year, an area the size of Wales. In August 1987, the US satellite NOAA detected 8000 separate fires at least a million square yards in size.
The release of this bound carbon is building up carbon dioxide in the air at the same rate as the burning of fossil fuels.
Clearing the forests also alters the reflectivity of the surface, changing convection currents and air circulation, decreasing rainfall in the tropics, increasing it in latitudes up to about 40 degrees, and decreasing it in the temperate latitudes beyond. The earth’s climate will be more like it was in the Cretaceous period!
In Cretaceous times the anthroposaurs had plenty of fossil fuels because the great coal making era was the Carboniferous starting 300 million years earlier. Plenty of oil lay in the rocks from the Jurassic Period almost 100 million years before.
And Cretaceous forests were also burnt. Thick deposits of carbon have been discovered in New Zealand and elsewhere associated with the Cretaceous terminal event. Was this carbon from forests being consciously burnt?
Carol Greitner and William Winner of Oregan State University have shown that, although plants normally take up more carbon-12 than carbon-13 during photosynthesis, in polluted air the carbon-13 take up is more closely in balance. The ratio of C-12 to C-13 remains as a permanent record in the tissues and can be used to test conditions at the time. Is the carbon dust found with some late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils richer in C-13 than would be expected? Is Cretaceous oil richer in C-13?
Carbon released from burnt forest might give an apparently contradictory picture. Limestone laid down at the time has less C-13 than C-12 apparently signifying that the air was less polluted. But it could be that there was more C-12 in the air. If anthroposaurs burnt forests and fossil fuels then a large amount of old carbon of biological origin would enter the atmosphere. Because the carbon would have been fixed by photosynthesis at a previous period when the air was unpolluted, it would be relatively richer in carbon-12. The proportion of carbon-12 in carbon dioxide circulating in the air and the oceans would therefore increase. Naturally then the proportion of carbon-12 incorporated into limestone from the shells of the foraminifera would also increase.
A similar phenomenon is occurring today. Old carbon is entering the air and old carbon contains less carbon-14, the isotope of carbon used in carbon dating, because it decays radioactively. Very old carbon in fossil fuels contains none. Carbon-14 is produced continuously from the impact of cosmic rays with nitrogen in the air and therefore is always present at a steady concentration. But its concentration in the air is starting to drop. Old carbon from the burning of forests is beginning to dilute it.
Though the average Brazilian consumes less meat each year than a domestic cat in the United States, he has to slash and burn forests to satisfy our demand for steaks and hamburgers. A habitat which harbors perhaps 50 per cent of all species is destroyed to make pastures for one species, cattle, and food for one other, man. The fall in variation of the hadrosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous might indicate they were herded. Could the anthroposaurs have burnt their own forests to provide more nutritious browsing for their “cattle?”
If the atmosphere in the late Cretaceous were gradually polluted its effects should show up in the fossil record as an adaptation of species to the pollution. Poisonous fumes or particles of dust in the air would induce the development of unusual nasal arrangements to attempt to prevent the pollutants from penetrating to the lungs.
Ankylosaurs were armored dinosaurs living at the end of the Cretaceous. They were related to a similar group called the nodosaurs which lived principally in the middle of the Cretaceous period. The earlier group had nasal passages consisting of a simple paired tube leading from the nostrils to the back of the throat. The ankylosaurs however had nasal passages stretched out into the shape of a letter ’S’ on either side of which there were additional passages forming almost a honeycomb. Teresa Maryanska has suggested that the purpose was to filter and moisten the air before it entered the lungs. Yet why should elaborate filtering systems have been necessary at the end of the Cretaceous but not apparently beforehand, even in closely related species, unless something was happening to the air?
Other species from distant parts were equally affected. Iguanodon orientalis from Mongolia had a huge bulbous nose supported by a bony arch.
Crested and non-crested hadrosaurs were contemporaneous about 75 million years ago. By the end of the dinosaurs’ reign 65 million years ago the crested hadrosaurs were particularly successful. The crests were either enormous plates or long projections having no ostensible use. The odd thing about the crests however was that they consisted of enormously extended nasal passages protected by the bone of the skull. There must have been evolutionary pressure to extend the nasal passages, and the skull had solved the problem of where to accommodate the resulting labyrinth by developing the crests. The evolutionary pressure was pollution.
The external shape of the crest did not always match the internal convolutions of the nasal passages suggesting that the external appearance was as important as the elaborate nasal extensions. Were they also visual signalling devices for courtship and mating? Hadrosaurs had acute vision judging by their well developed eye sockets and the presence of a bony ring (the sclerotic ring) to support the large eye. Several species of hadrosaurs seemed to inhabit the same territory and the visual signals could have served to distinguish them. They could have served to signal their position in the social hierarchy and probably the sex of the animal. But why did the nasal passages extend to serve these purposes unless some other cause had stimulated their development? Having started to develop a feature for one reason it is characteristic of sexual selection to make a virtue of necessity and use it for another.
David Weishampel of Florida State University has shown that the cavities could have also acted as resonance chambers for audible displays or communication. Other hadrosaurs without crests probably had inflatable sacs over their nostrils which served the same purpose and could have also served as a visual display. And such sacs would have developed as a protection against pollution in the air. Thus two distinct groups of hadrosaurs had different solutions to the same problem but one solution left obvious fossil records whereas the other has to be inferred. The development of nasal flaps and convoluted nasal passages is best explained as an evolutionary response to increasing atmospheric pollution. Once the protective measures had began to evolve these dinosaurs found that they had other uses too. That is typical of the way evolution works.
Evidence from the elaborate display apparatus of the ceratopsians and the hadrosaurs, and the signs of ritual duelling in pachycephalosaurs (and possibly ceratopsians) indicates that the dinosaurs were by this stage if not before, territorial and “possessive”. The pachycephalosaurs had high bony heads that they probably used in pushing contests or butting contests to assert dominance rather as sheep and goats do. The elaborate frills of the ceratopsians, besides serving a defensive purpose and as an anchor for the massive jaw muscles, were probably display devices to signal dominance and might have been brightly colored. These animals might also have engaged in ritual duelling by engaging their horns and grappling rather like rutting stags. Bakker’s contention is that such active sexual behavior is a sign of warm-blood.
If the anthroposaurs were as territorial as mankind then we could expect them to engage in conflict and, if their society became technical then the conflicts could have been huge, just as mankind’s World Wars were—about 20 million people died in the first World War and about 55 million people in the second. The severity of wars have grown exponentially like population and we can expect several hundred million deaths as a very minimum if another world war started.
Many of the symptoms of our own time were displayed at the end of the Cretaceous. What of nuclear war? Any advanced society worth its salt will have discovered the equivalence of matter and energy. Did the anthroposaurs? John Noble Wilford tells us that “uranium and dinosaurs are often found together. The bones soak up and concentrate the uranium in the mineralization process”. Perhaps there are less prosaic reasons for this association.
Evidence of prehistoric nuclear combustion has been found by French scientists in Gabon, West Africa. Uranium consists of different isotopes, mainly Uranium-235 and Uranium-238, which are normally found in constant ratios in any uranium deposits. Only U-235 is suitable for atomic reactors, and it is just this isotope that the ore lacks. It is depleted in U-235 just as if the reactive isotope had been extracted leaving the “waste” Uranium 238 and some other rare elements. The scientists’ explained that the isotope had leached out and spontaneously reacted in a natural atomic pile. But it could equally have been deliberately extracted.
The deposits are far older than the Cretaceous but neither do we extract valuable minerals from deposits that are being laid down today. The anthroposaurs were tapping rocks laid down long before they appeared on the scene.
What would our waste ponds at atomic weapon factories and nuclear power stations look like in 65 million years? What would the remains of the Chernobyl atomic reactor look like when the passage of time has eroded away the concrete and the radioactive residue has permeated the surrounding clay? Perhaps in these instances too there might be some spontaneous reactions, chemical and physical which the geologists of 65 million AD will believe have occurred naturally.
The nuclear power industry depends upon nuclear fission which generates hundreds of types of highly radioactive elements as waste materials. Some are intensely radioactive but have short half lives and become depleted if stored for a few years. Many others are radioactive for anything from thousands to millions of years. The USA has millions of gallons of high level waste, that will be radioactive for millions of years. Some of it was stored at West Valley in storage tanks that were not expected to last for more than 35 years!
High level waste from the Manhattan Project, the development of the wartime atom bomb, was dumped on to land surrounding the town of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and apparently forgotten. Then local citizens became alarmed as many became afflicted with and died of a variety of cancers. Tests showed soil on the playing field of the local high school had radiation readings 700 times the background level.
Besides high level waste there are also large amounts of low level waste that is not so intensely radioactive though some of it may also be active for long periods. In fact there is evidence that nuclear plant operators have diluted high level waste until it could be falsely described as low level waste. Low level waste surprisingly often “accidentally” seeps into the ground or streams. Thus it is conveniently disposed of. If the secret got out, the experts will reassure us it is “only low level waste”.
By the year 2000 AD there will be 2000 tons of plutonium stockpiled and 160 tons a year being produced, all in “civilian” reactor programs. Twenty pounds is enough to make an atomic bomb. Criminals or fanatics who got hold of this small amount of plutonium could make a bomb. It would not have to be well designed or efficient. Even a nuclear damp squib could cause horrific damage especially in a populated area. It would spread so much radioactive contamination that it could be worse than an atomic blast.
Only 45 years after the first nuclear reaction, mankind has some 600 nuclear power plants in operation. Rosalie Bertell, a cancer specialist, calculates that 13 million people in the world have died of fallout since the War. That does not include the effects of Chernobyl. If there were a nuclear war, a hit on a nuclear power station would produce a very dirty blast indeed. All the fission products of the nuclear reactors’ cores would be vaporized and sent high into the atmosphere to cause fallout never before seen by mankind. Long-lived radioisotopes would pollute the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Each power plant destroyed in this way would be equivalent to an extra 25 megatons of nuclear bombs in killing potential, though the damage would be spread in time.
Scientists have noticed at nuclear test sites in sandy areas that one effect of the atomic blast is to fuse the sand into a green glass. Yet glass of this type is found throughout the globe in certain geological strata. Steiger asks:
Could it be possible that these sites provide evidence of a prehistoric nuclear war?
Droplets of molten glass are found in the K-T boundary layer. One might wonder whether any of the late Cretaceous sediments contain unusual amounts of long-lived nuclear isotopes or their decay products.
Advocates of the asteroid theory point to stress lines in pieces of quartz, stress lines that have only been noted in quartz in four different circumstances, one being in the residues at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The other three instances are in the laboratory produced by tests, in known meteorite craters, and on the Nevada nuclear test site. The expert’s argument goes:
We have found stressed quartz; we know it occurs where meteorites have fallen; therefore a meteorite fell. (Oh, the same effects can be made artificially in the laboratory or by nuclear bomb blasts, but we all know those are irrelevant in this context.)
Though pollution can damage forests much worse damage would occur from nuclear attack and fallout. Pine trees protect themselves against damage by exuding a resin which subsequently hardens and becomes amber. An explanation of the large amounts of amber found in some parts of the world could be that radiation or pollution severely damaged or stressed pine forests leaving the trees exuding their natural defensive substance in large quantities.
After the disaster at Chernobyl, scientists studying the effects of fallout on coniferous forests found that the trees quickly absorbed dangerous radioactive cesium and incorporated it into their wood. But not by the root system—cesium sinks only slowly into the soil and it would take 25 years or more for it to begin to be taken up this way—pine needles directly absorbed the radioactive elements. Thus radioactive cesium is absorbed rapidly through pine needles and more slowly through roots subjecting the trees to severe stress for a long period but without necessarily killing them. When the trees eventually did die long lived isotopes would return to the soil to continue their damage in succeeding generations. Amber is variously dated. Baltic amber is usually dated in the Oligocene epoch of about 30 million years ago but the Eocene epoch of 55 million years ago is also given. Valchovite, the amber from Czechoslovakia, is dated to the late Cretaceous period, the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Radioactive emissions preserve. A dinosaur “mummy” hadrosaur discovered by Charles Sternberg died 65 million years ago, lying on its back apparently unharmed and with no signs of predators or scavengers having touched it. It is odd that it did not decay or get eaten. Supposedly it dried out in the sun, got swiftly washed downstream and got covered with fine mud so quickly that its dried skin had no time to rehydrate and decay. Dinosaur mummies are rare, but when found they are usually late Cretaceous hadrosaurs. Why should they have died so perfectly and been preserved? Because they died of gamma radiation and neutrons which preserved them as surely as it would preserve strawberries in a plastic bag?
Failure of photosynthesis is another mechanism of dinosaur extinctions. Dust from the crashing asteroid or erupting volcanoes cut off the light and heat of the sun, preventing plants from making sugars and cellulose from carbon dioxide and water. Plants would die then animals would starve, and if the darkness continued for long enough whole species would become extinct. It could happen today. Some scientists wrote in 1984…
…clouds of fine particles would soon spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere, absorbing and scattering sunlight and thus darkening and cooling the earth’s surface. Continental temperatures could fall rapidly—well below freezing for months, even in summertime… We have only recently become aware of how severe the cold and the dark might be… agriculture, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, could be severely damaged for a year or more, causing widespread famine… humans would die from freezing, starvation, disease, and the effects of radiation… the extinction of many plant and animal species can be expected, and in extreme cases, the extinction of most non-oceanic species might occur…
They were warning the Pope of the dangers, not of volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts, but of a nuclear winter following a nuclear war.
They concluded:
Nuclear war could thus carry in its wake a destruction of life unparalleled at any time during the tenure of humans on earth, and might therefore imperil the future of humanity.
Quite. And did the anthroposaurs actually do this 65 million years ago to cause the Cretaceous mass extinction of species? If a nuclear war could cause extinctions now, why shouldn’t a nuclear war among anthroposaurs have done the same then?
Luis Alverez himself in 1982 drew the parallels between the asteroid collision and a nuclear war. A major exchange of bombs on the scale we have them at present could release the same energy as the fall of a 1000 yard wide asteroid. The asteroid would concentrate all the impact in one spot and be capable of blowing chunks of terrestrial matter high into the atmosphere, even out into space. A nuclear exchange would not put as much matter into the high stratosphere, but what did go up would be more evenly distributed geographically, and might also be spread out over a period of time.
Chicago University scientists found deposits of carbon distributed world wide in the iridium layers. Apparently there had been extensive and intense fires. The fires would have darkened the skies with dense smoke and poisoned the air with incompletely burnt carbon forming the deadly poisonous gas carbon monoxide. Couldn’t atomic warfare have ignited these fires? Was there a nuclear winter?
A sudden cooling certainly did occur. The coal layer at the end of the Cretaceous Period marks a distinct change in climate. In the more recent rocks above it are cool climate plants like the giant sequioa; in the older rocks below it are subtropical plants like ferns and cycads. Is this layer of coal a fossil of the nuclear winter?
In 1962-63 southern England experienced its coldest winter since 1740. The cause was a peculiar meandering of the stratospheric jetstream, a fierce continuous blast of wind which influences weather patterns even though it is itself above the weather zone. Over Britain the jetstream pushed arctic air further south.
1962 marked the culmination, prior to the implementation of the nuclear atmospheric test ban treaty, of an enormous escalation of atmospheric testing. About 20 megatons were tested in 1958, but in both 1961 and 1962 the tonnage tested was about 200 megatons. K.Y.Kondratyev, the former USSR’s leading atmospheric scientist says that the tests severely disturbed thermal radiation in the upper atmosphere leading to four per cent less sunlight reaching the surface.
The Russians were particularly concerned because one result was that their grain harvest in 1963 was disastrous. The attenuation of the sunlight was the result of the production of brown nitrogen oxides in the nuclear fireballs. And that was only with 200 megatons exploded over deserts or oceans such that dust and smoke were not created. A nuclear winter is not in the realms of fantasy. Smoke and dust do not have to be sent into the stratosphere to prevent the sun’s rays from reaching the surface—nitrogen oxides do the job quite well, though any serious nuclear conflagration will provide smoke and dust aplenty as well as brown fumes.
Another reason offered for the downfall of our dinosaurian predecessors is radiation from space. We do not need supernovas or any such explanations for the danger that we face today from radiation from space. Few people will be unaware of the hole in the ozone layer observed over the Antarctic. More recently one has been noted in the Arctic and it is getting bigger. The March 1985 edition of the UN Environment Program News stated that “ozone depletion could seriously affect many life forms”. Ozone blocks the entry of high energy UV radiation to the earth’s surface. UV causes blindness and skin cancer in humans.
The agents destroying the ozone layer are CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons. We release CFCs into the air faster than nature degrades them. They react with UV radiation in the stratosphere to give free radicals which then trigger a chain reaction breaking ozone into ordinary oxygen which has no protective value against UV. Each 2.5 per cent rise in CFC concentration causes an extra million skin cancers. The World Wide Fund for nature claims that the extra UV reaching the earth’s surface is killing phytoplankton, the primary food source of the oceans.
The CFCs are also particularly powerful greenhouse gases, 1000 times more effective than carbon dioxide. Dr Robert Watson maintains that the ozone layer will continue to reduce for the next fifty years whatever we do because of the chlorine already released. International Conferences calling for cuts in production of CFCs can apparently achieve nothing in our lifetime. We can only take measures that might benefit our children! Burning tropical forests contributes also.
The amount of smoke produced from the fires in the Amazon region, according to Dr Alberto Setzer of Brazil’s space research institute, is equivalent to a hundred volcanoes erupting. Professor Paul Crutzens, Head of the Max Planck Institute at Mainz and one of the world’s leading experts on the ozone layer, says these fires are among the main causes of ozone destruction. The peak of Amazon burning is in August. It takes about ten days for the smoke to penetrate the stratosphere and travel south. The peak of Antarctic ozone erosion occurs from September to November. Maybe the soot layer in the K-T boundary zone reported from New Zealand and elsewhere indicates that the anthroposaurs destroyed their ozone layer and left themselves exposed to deadly UV radiation. Again one feels justified in asking whether today’s events have been experienced before by the earth.
I have tried to convince you that an intelligent dinosaur could have destroyed much of the life on earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Many facts support the hypothesis. Moreover we can see the intelligent species with which we are familiar—ourselves—creating conditions that seem to mirror those that were so destructive then.
Needless to say, experts often find it hard to see.
James Lovelock and Michael Allaby, experts on the biosphere of the earth, sound like public relations executives for the polluters. They insist they do not wish to ridicule “legitimate concern” about the state of the terrestrial environment, but simply to “place in perspective the puny attempts of industrialists and farmers” in polluting the environment. They compare them with what nature has done in the past through glaciations, volcanic eruptions and meteoric collisions. Despite all of these natural disasters, whose scale dwarfs the attempts of man, life continues. There is no need to worry about human pollution—the earth has been able to cope with far worse. All species modify their environment just by being alive. Mankind is no different and cannot degrade his surroundings to the point of extinction. They conclude:
Our power to destroy the world, or even ourselves, is quite imaginary, a product of our hubris.
Yet elsewhere Lovelock argues that the control systems of the earth would break down if the human population were to reach ten billion. Mankind would then desperately have to artificially maintain what formerly were self regulatory feedback systems. We would no longer have a natural environment that sustained life but a “spaceship earth” with life support systems provided by the occupants. Unless, that is, we succumb to “gigadeath”, in which case mankind will have done—simply through procreating—what these same experts claimed was “quite imaginary, a product of our hubris”.
And why chose ten billion as the danger level? What if he has overlooked some factor and the figure is five billion? Then the threshold has already been crossed and we are passengers of spaceship earth without realizing it. Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.
Lovelock seems genuinely full of concern when he writes:
Each time we significantly alter part of some natural process of regulation or introduce some new source of energy or information, we are increasing the probability that one of these changes will weaken the stability of the entire system, by cutting down the variety of response.
Bravo! Surely urgent action is merited to make sure we do not increase the probability that some danger point is exceeded.
What does he recommend? No need to panic—there is…
…ample time and every inclination on the part of scientists to investigate and prove or disprove allegations, and then leave it to the law-makers to decide rationally what should be done. Aaaargh! He wants to involve a cabal of experts. Not only are the scientific experts to mull and ponder over the diagnosis but the political experts are then to debate it in the legislature and legal experts are to test it in courtrooms. Too bad if the patient is in terminal decline.
Others are less sanguine. Dr Hans Martin says we do not have time…
…to develop our skills. We are presented with a curriculum which includes primary and secondary school, university courses and graduate studies simultaneously.
In the imagery of Dr Stephen Schneider of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research: we are staring into a murky crystal ball and cannot clearly foresee the future; if we waited five years hoping the ball would clear, the vision awaiting us would be all the more horrific. Their message is evident. We have no time to study, no time to understand the cybernetics of our environment. There is no time to decide what we can safely do. Deterioration continues daily. We must call a halt to the damage now. But we may already be too late!
None of this hubris worries Allaby and Lovelock but something else does:
The credible threats must come from outside the earth and the impact of a large planetismal is the most immediate of them… We have a moral obligation to take such modest, inexpensive steps as we can to avert them…
An asteroid impact that occurs perhaps once every 26 million years, if their interpretation of the fossil record is correct (and the next is not due for some 13 million years), is far more worrying than the destruction being wreaked every second by mankind!
Can’t you picture the Professors Expertosaur, 65 million years ago saying exactly the same thing? And worse, convincing their compatriots that they should examine the skies and muse on the best ways of saving life on earth by deflecting planetismals while everything died about them. The meteor never came but the anthroposaurs fooled observers 65 million years later into believing it had, by simulating all its symptoms.
We are all, let alone the experts, indifferent to the fate of the earth—evidently the anthroposaurs were too. Like the anthroposaurs, we do not seem to have grasped that we are also on the list of endangered species, and as more go, so we get nearer to the top.
Wilford said of the dinosaurs that they were limited; they were incapable of foreseeing or preventing their own extinction. We are no different! Is any one of us able to use our intelligence for the broader good when selfish motives intervene? Why do we accept what the experts tell us? Why are we optimistic about the future but apathetic about destroying the planet? Have we inherited fatal flaws from our predecessors, the dinosaurs?
