Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…And sadly, the big things… Well, everything dies, but the big things have a lot of trouble recovering. Yeah, so I mean, this is, you know, a classic example. So, oh well, you know, what is paleontology good for? Well, actually really it’s extinction, which is very relevant right now in that we have a very good handle on when you have extreme climate stress what tends to suffer more and what tends to suffer less. And as we say, big things fundamentally do. They require more resources, they require more area of land. You need to roam further, which means, you know, if you’re a mouse and you happen to have a little bit of land and that bit doesn’t get hit, you’re fine; whereas if you’re an elephant and you need all of this land and even a chunk of it goes wrong, well that’s probably maybe not enough for you to survive anymore. So yeah, big things suffer disproportionately badly from these things, and mostly as well, we think terrestrial things generally do worse than things in water because water’s a great equilibrating medium, you know, it takes ages to heat up, it takes ages to cool down. Yes, if you live in specific coastal conditions or something, maybe you can’t travel that easily, but you know, whales can go from pole to pole quite happily, and plenty of other fish do too. So if it’s too hot or too cold or too nasty here, you can just swim somewhere else, whereas if you’re an animal and you hit a desert or you hit a mountain range or you hit a river, you stop moving and you’re trapped and then you die. So dinosaurs were, yeah, the worst possible combination. They were mostly big and they were mostly on land, and yeah, it’s not really surprising they did very badly out of it. And then some species did survive. I guess I think you’ve said that it’s very possible that some dinosaurs even survived for a time……

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