No turning back: the life and death of animal species

451 Pages·2004·2.48 MB·English

by  Richard Ellis

N O
T U R N I N G
B A C K
The Life and Death of
Animal Species
WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY
R I C H A R D E L L I S
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
If you’re booked for extinction, there’s nothing much you can do
about it.
—Will Cuppy,
How to Become Extinct, 1941.
Let us divide up extinction into more manageable pieces. First,
there are the great extinctions caused by climatic shifts. It’s sim-
ply too hot or too cold for something to survive. This kind of ex-
tinction we can understand, since the change of climate attacks
food supplies and all aspects of habitat at the same time.
Then there are the extinctions caused by hunting—the dodo
and the solitaire supposedly come into this category.
Then come the other kinds of extinction, which are alto-
gether more mysterious. Some species are too rigidly specialized.
Their lack of adaptability to even small changes, changes so
minute that they do not register as such to us, causes them to
die out.
As humans we rightly value the ability to adapt to new sur-
roundings. Those who don’t, we cheerfully label dinosaurs. Com-
panies that can’t adapt deserve to go bust.
And don’t we feel, deep down, that those species that have
become extinct somehow “deserved it” too, that their very in-
ability to survive was a moral black mark against them? By a curi-
ous alogic, not surviving means you didn’t deserve to survive in
the first place.
—Robert Twigger,
The Extinction Club, 2001

Contents
Epigraph iii
Preface vii
I. INTRO DUCTION
Extinction (Sort of ) Explained 3
Mass Extinctions 33
II. WHERE DID EVERY BODY GO?
OK, What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs? 51
The Dinosaurs Are Not Extinct After All 77
Your Extinct Ancestors 91
The Pleistocene Extinctions 95
vi Contents
III. FINALE
Extinctions (and Nonextinctions) in Near Time
(The Last 1,000 Years) 131
Death (and Extinction) by Disease 185
Threatened Species, or Under the Gun 193
The Anti-Extinctions 249
Rescuing Animals from Oblivion 269
Mammals Back from the Brink 293
The Oceans 327
Everybody Off the Train 353
References 361
Index 403
About the Author
Other Books by Richard Ellis
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
I think I have been writing one book all my adult life. Well, maybe two.
The one book has been about life on Earth, the other was about Atlantis.
The one book, which I began almost thirty years ago, was conveniently di-
vided into book-sized pieces by various editors. I began with sharks,
moved on to whales and dolphins, followed with whaling history, the great
white shark, sea monsters, creatures of the depths, the giant squid, and the
origin and the evolution of life in the sea, and then chronicled the modern-
day depletion of the oceans’ resources and the disappearance of many of
the creatures I had written about earlier. I recently took a paleontological
detour to investigate the lives of the long-extinct marine reptiles—the
ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, and this excursion into the past
inevitably brought up the topic of extinction, the subject of this book.
As told in The Empty Ocean, extinction is no stranger to the sea. In his-
torical times, some of the most noteworthy species losses have taken
place in the water; more important, there are others to come. Steller’s sea
cow, discovered in 1741 by Vitus Bering’s shipwrecked crew on the island
that would later bear his name, was hunted into extinction a mere 28
years later. There are no more great auks, Labrador ducks, or Caribbean
monk seals, all eliminated in the past two centuries. Overfishing has
driven many species to the brink, and our children’s children may never
see a barndoor stake, a northern right whale, or a broadbill swordfish. An
viii Preface
important study, published in 2003 by Ransom Myers and Boris Worm
just as The Empty Ocean was coming off the presses, noted that industrial-
ized fishing has reduced the numbers of all large predatory fishes—tuna,
swordfish, marlins, groupers, codfish, sharks, skates and rays—by 90 per-
cent. Failure to apply the brakes to longlining and gillnetting, the most
destructive fishing methods ever devised, will surely result in mass marine
extinctions in the near future.
As tempting as it is for conservationists like me to couple “overfish-
ing” with “extinction,” the latter process has been part of the history of
life on earth since the first cells subdivided billions of years ago, long be-
fore Homo destructivus made his appearance on stage. Even though
many—probably most—of the pieces of the puzzle are missing, almost
everyone acknowledges the long, complex process of evolution, where
early species gave rise to later ones, and so ad infinitum. But what hap-
pened to all those earlier species? They went extinct, of course, and H.
sapiens had absolutely nothing to do with it, since we’ve been around only
for about 100,000 years.
Many of the earlier extinctions were caused by forces that exceed any-
thing that humans could devise, and in some cases, may even exceed their
powers of comprehension. Try to imagine volcanic eruptions lasting for a
million years (while you’re at it, try to imagine a million years), releasing
forces that destroy 90 percent of all life on earth. The great Permian ex-
tinction, which occurred 250 million years ago, was so catastrophic that life
was almost brought to a close. A hundred and eighty-five million years
later, at the close of the Cretaceous, an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest
slammed into the Earth at 60,000 miles an hour, and created such environ-
mental havoc that the oceans boiled, skies darkened, acid rain fell for years,
and tsunamis half a mile high drowned everything in their path. The
Chicxulub impact, named for the Mexican village where the impact crater
was discovered, took out various protozoans and algae, the ammonites,
the pterosaurs, the pterosaurs, the mosasaurs, and the last of the nonavian
dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, the most formidable land predator
that ever lived.
One might expect that such an enormous cataclysm would destroy
virtually every living thing, but many creatures somehow survived the
impact and the chaos that followed, including ancestral birds, early mam-
mals, and ancestral crocodiles and turtles. The “Age of Reptiles” ended