Sudden Mass Extinction Event Discovery

Sleen writes: "A new study that will appear in today's issue of the journal Science reports that the mass extinction event that preceded the age of the dinosaurs was much more sudden than expected. This article has some preliminary details. The dinosaurs actually survived this event and went on to be quite successful. But the small mammal-like reptiles did not. At this point they don't know if this cataclysm was caused by an asteroid, like in the case of 65mya at the KT boundary, or if it was caused by excessive volcanism. In the case of the dinosaur extinctions, they were on their way down when the asteroid hit, perhaps being the last straw. But this earlier event that somehow wiped out up to 80% of life on earth didn't kill them off. Interesting..."

Comments

evolution

[boarder]

You know... this is one of the things that has always boggled my mind. If it weren't for this mass extinction, then dinosaurs might not have continued. If they hadn't continued and the other small mammal-like reptiles had, would humans have evolved? All of these extremely random occurances that had to happen for us to come about as we are today, happened. That is interesting in and of itself. Some other thought exercises for you:

On another Earth-like planet where things developed just like here, if that extinction doesn't occur will these mammal-like reptiles develop intelligence and rule and populate their solar system? e.g. Divergent Evolution.

Or will natural selection and stuff still produce mammals that become similar to us eventually taking over despite the dominant reptiles? e.g. Convergent Evolution

Would we as humans still evolved if this extinction hadn't occured?

Are these kinds of random occurances NECESSARY to create intelligent life in the universe? If so, there may be much less life out there than I previously thought. I have always thought that even if our solar system is one in a billion able to support life, then there are still billions of galaxies with a billion stars. Therefore there must be other intelligent life out there. If something like this had to occur to create us, maybe the odds aren't so good.

Suppose there is a God or super-intelligent alien race watching over the universe. What if He/They saw that these mammal-like reptiles were poised to take over the planet and create intelligence, but they didn't like their specific personality traits. Would they create this mass extinction to save the universe from a violent species?

I love thinking about fun stuff like this. I'm sure much smarter people than me can come up with much better questions, but you can start really opening up areas of conversation with this.