The Mistaken Extinction - Book Report/Review Example

Introduction “The Mistaken Extinction- Dinosaur Evolution and Origin of Birds” written by Lowell Dingus and Timothy Rowe discusses about all major issues which investigate the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs caught our attention during the year 1841 when the famous scientists, Richard Owen first coined the name; “Dinosauria”. Dinosaurs have managed to capture the attention of both young and old due to the mystery which shrouds them. Also their gigantic size, feeding pattern and strange appearance contributes to the mystery which has captured the attention of all. The most interesting part of the dinosaurs is their extinction which has fascinated the scientists always. The book mainly underlines the assumptions which the different scientists have proposed which have become different schools of thoughts relating to the mystery of the extinction. It also at some point questions whether or not the dinosaurs are actually extinct or they have evolved into some higher species which we see around us. Thus the book puts forward an even more interesting proposition claiming that the dinosaurs may be still be present among us only in an evolved fashion which we are not able to understand on distinguish by our naked eye. Context In the beginning the book tries to underline all the given facts that we actually know about the extinction of the dinosaurs. It states that although the cause of the extinction is not known but most scientists are sure of the period in which the dinosaurs ceased to exist, which the cretaceous period. The cretaceous period marked about some three quarter extinction of both the plant life and the animal life in the form of dinosaurs. In Earth’s geological record the cretaceous period can be marked as the K-Pg boundary which is found in both marine and terrestrial rocks. The book tries to solve the entire case of this mystery extinction just on the premise of solving a murder mystery in the several chapters which form the part one of the book. The book is proposed to have two individual goals by which it tries to solve the mystery of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Firstly, it tries to distinguish the different hypotheses which are presented by different scientists during the different ages on the basis of scientific reasons. If scientific reasons are found for the hypothesis then the book has accepted them and carried forward in trying to analyze and establish them. Also the book has tried to connect the hypotheses with the evidences found in the rocks and fossil records and further tries establishes them on the basis of consistency. If the hypothesis is found to be consistent then the book has chosen to support it (Dingus & Rowe, 1998). Occam’s razor or the Principle of Parsimony is used by the author. It is a type of problem solving method which was devised William of Ockham. It states that the hypothesis with less number of assumptions should be chosen from a group of hypotheses. It is based on the idea that since everything of the hypothesis is uncertain therefore less assumptions made is a better choice of obtaining an error free answer. The Occam’s razor is used by the scientists as a heuristic tool to support their discoveries. It helps them to construct development models rather than comparing between the existing models. After a thorough research the book underlines two events which could possibly lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs in the cretaceous period namely, the massive volcanic activity which was the second largest volcanic activity since the birth of Earth. The effects of this volcanic activity can be seen in the forms of the huge amount of lava deposits which can be found in the plains of India. The book suggests that this volcanic activity which changed the face of Earth by the tremendous amounts of lava deposits was the cause of the alteration of the environment of Earth and the eventual extinction of the dinosaurs. Any volcanic activity is succeeded with huge amount of lava and magma which not only covers the Earth and destroys the soil and all the other plant life on its way. Also the volcanic activity destroys any animal life on its way by killing them. It also alters the atmospheric conditions of the affected place by making it unfit for living. Thus the book in this manner tries to put forward the hypothesis which states that the second largest volcanic activity could be the cause of the extinction of dinosaurs. The second hypothesis that is propounded by the book is that the Earth shattering impact by the comet or asteroid which hit Yucatan could be the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The book goes on to propound that when an asteroid or a comet hits a planet it causes a shattering explosion which causes the debris to be dispersed into the atmosphere in the form of heavy clouds. These heavy clouds and the other debris and particles which remain suspended in the air and even around the planet could have been the cause of blocking the Sun’s rays which could not properly reach the Earth’s surface. It is known that the Sun’s rays are the essential element to life because the plants are unable to perform photosynthesis without them. Therefore when the plants stopped photosynthesizing there was an acute shortage of oxygen which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Also the general degenerated environment of the Earth contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs too. Although the book proposes these two hypotheses and strongly tries to criticize and establish them, it too fails to give a definite answer like every other researcher and the scientists due to the lack of proper evidences strongly supporting the two theories. In the second half the author tries to investigate another method of evolutionary relationship in his quest to find perfect answers for reason of extinction of the dinosaurs that is Cladistics. Cladistics is a type of biological classification which tries to group the organisms based on the basis that whether or not the organisms share the same characteristics which can be noticed in the group’s last common ancestor. On this basis it concludes that both the species are similar and one has evolved from the other. This method of investigation was used by the book because of the radical discovery of the Archaeopteryx and the Deinonychus which had some similar physical attributes just like the present day birds like their resemblance in their bone structure in the limbs with the birds. But still no consensus was found due to the problems which remained unexplained by the Ostrom’s bold hypothesis. Conclusion The book concludes that since Deinonychus existed tens of millions of years after Archaeopteryx it cannot be the ancestor of the present living birds. Also in the later years the critics have discovered resemblance of the birds with other common reptiles on the basis of the fact they both have tubular skeletons which are made up of bones which are thin-walled and hollow. Also another fact comes up that the braincase of the Archaeopteryx resembles the braincase of the present day crocodiles. Also the mystery about the flight of the birds and the dinosaurs remains unsolved in the book. The book although throws a good amount of light on all the different types of hypothesis by discussing them in great details and by investigating them thoroughly, it fails to provide the concluding answer as to what actually led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The book ends with the concluding statement stating that mystery of the extinction of the dinosaurs still remains unsolved and the battle of thoughts which begun from Charles Darwin in the Victorian age still continues without any certain fact to conclude it. Reference Dingus, L., & Rowe, T. (1998). The mistaken extinction (1st ed.). New York: W.H. Freeman. Read More