Film Analysis: The Great Dying

It’s hard to imagine how brief our existence on this planet is. Imagine if you will that we summarized how humans came to dominate the planet in your average 2-hour movie. The very first frame starts us off with the accretion of the planet. About 18 minutes into the film the first microbial life starts to take shape on this clump of space junk. Nothing much seems to be happening. People around in the theater are already running out of popcorn and getting cranky. Cellphones start illuminating the dark auditorium. Most of the people sitting next to you start to pack up and leave, after all they are just staring at a circle anyways. Off to a pretty rocky start, the movie only starts to develop the main character around an hour and 5 minutes in
Like many aspects in the time scale of our earth and solar system, it is difficult to comprehend its scale at the surface. A mass extinction is classified as a massive dying of animal species in a short geologic window. In the above analogy that would mean having anywhere from 70% to 90% of creature species die in a fraction of a second. Mass extinctions are driven by a compounding of events. For example, the extinction that defined the beginning of the Triassic was called quite literally: The Great Dying. During the Great dying an estimated 54% of all families were lost. Just to clarify A family is such a broad term, it is the first category that would separate a panda from a fox. This was speculated to be caused by several events. For starters, there Is thought that there was an impact event akin to what we believe killed off the dinosaurs, on top of that massive effusions of flood basalts which also released massive ash clouds and acidic aerosols that would have blotted out the sun; On top of that ocean waters became so devoid of oxygen that most of the biomass in the waters died and were replaced by bacteria that produced massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which would not only have poisoned all life on the ground but would have also destroyed the ozone so that any survivors were lightly baked by the Suns ultraviolet waves. This event was so severe that life on earth took over 10 million
One of the most defining of which is a sudden and drastic change in the status quo that various life-forms are not able to adapt to quickly enough. This can be seen clearly when man migrated to what we now as Australia around 55,000 (± 5,000) years ago (Miller, 1990). At the time, the continent was host to a vast variety of life that would seem quite foreign today. Among them were the Dinornis (Giant Moa) and more specifically Genyornis, massive emu-like flightless birds that grew to 2-3 meters. The Genyornis was found to be quite common in the fossil record until 60,000 – 50,000 years ago and was speculated to have gone extinct 50,000 ± 5,000 years ago (Miller, 1990). This extinction coincides with a slightly more arid climate and direct competition for their nutrient source in plants; As the new human inhabitants had been burning the plant life in the area which had previously not been prone to fires and was ill equipped to recover from the increased destruction. The giant birds were not known to have natural predators but there has been evidence of some direct predation by humans (Miller, 1990). While most of these birds vanished to never be seen again thanks to their food source being consumed in man-made fires, some of them managed to survive. The Dromaius which transformed into the modern Emu (same area), was thought to have been able to survive on more diverse