Gamma-Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?

National Geographic News ^ | 03 Apr 2009 | Anne Minard

[montomike]

Sounds like you have spent way, way too much time in the bunker with a copy of Excel.

I was just thinking of the Dyson Sphere episode of Star Trek Next Generation where they pull Scotty out of the transporter infinite loop and he rescues them by figuring out the Dyson Sphere around a solar system.

[SunkenCiv]

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BGHater.

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[InABunkerUnderSF]

Actually, I just used the Windows scientific calculator.

This is the sort of thing happens when business gets so slow that I have time to freep in the middle of the day. I wish Obama would stop trying to “save” the economy. My clients are afraid to spend money.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

As I remember the guesses now are that this was the second worst mass extinction, not as bad as the Permian/Triassic extinction which led to the age of the Dinosaurs, but worse than the most famous mass extinction, the Cretaceous/Tertiary one that wiped out the Dinosaurs. Harder to prove, since there were no land animals to speak of in the Ordovician.

There was a later mass extinction in the Tertiary in which the dominant primitive mammals and giant birds lost out to the more modern types of mammals (except in South America and Australia where they held out much longer, even to the modern period.