The Downfall of the Dinos... How Much Do We Really Know?

I am co-founder of my school's e-newspaper, which myself and a few like-minded friends set up just over a year ago with the aim of sharing important, relevant and also not-so-relevant-and-frankly-quite-wacky news stories with our school.

I love being a part of this and even more so, I love being able to research scientific and engineering developments for our e-paper. (As a side note, if anybody enjoys writing, browsing the internet and having an excuse to frequently meet up with friends and chow down on snackage, I highly recommend starting one yourself!)

I volunteered to compose our last issue's Big Article for the front page and found out some pretty interesting stuff about the dinos. I thought you guys might be interested to know!

251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, 90% of the world’s species became extinct. Why?

The current dominating theory is that the mass extinction was caused by volcanic eruptions across a vast expanse of land, now known as Siberia. This theory has never fully satisfied scientists; Daniel Rothman from MIT has been studying Permian rock samples and has announced that carbon levels around this time increased too quickly to have been caused by merely volcanoes. A likely cause for the concentration of carbon compounds is microbes.

Rothman and his team analysed the genetic information of a microbe called Methanosarcina*, a methane-producing microorganism accountable for the majority of today’s methane and discovered that it developed its ability to generate methane about 251 million years ago.

One catch is that Methanosarcina needs huge quantities of nickel to produce methane at such a rate. Siberian lava is rich in nickel and nickel levels shot up almost exactly 251 million years ago, which seems to suggest that volcanic eruptions triggered the production of methane by the Methanosarcina, which in turn triggered the extinction of so many species.

Anthony Barnosky from the University of California says, “It's a fascinating idea that the evolution of a new life form led to an extinction.” We still don’t know what exactly happened all those years ago, but we are getting closer, one microbe at a time. I'm not sure which theory is most likely, but this is quite compelling, don't you think?

*Frankly, this is far too difficult to pronounce. I propose we nickname this microbe Jeffrey, or Orlando. Thoughts? :D