he latest in the string of animal mass mortality incidents across the globe has caused many to wonder if an animal apocalypse is on the brink.
View Mass Animal Deaths
in a larger map
Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation, told CBS News that blackbirds don’t have very good night vision and that they were simply frightened.
As for the fish and the crabs, the cause of the fish die-off in Brazil is yet to be determined, but officials in Md. told the Baltimore Sun the sensitive spot fish were most likely killed by cold water. According to the Daily Mail, environmental experts believe lower than average temperatures are to blame for the crab deaths.more
Mega die-off
During the last catastrophic animal extinction, more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and giant bears, died out. Scientists have debated for years over the cause of the extinction, with both of the major hypotheses—human overhunting and climate change—insufficient to account for the mega die-off.
An extraterrestrial explosion could have triggered a wave of massive wildfires that reduced to ashes the mastodons of the day, say the scientists. At one site called Murray Springs in Arizona, a well-known Clovis site, the scientists found megafauna covered by the comet debris.
“It would have had major effects on humans,” said one of the researchers, Douglas Kennett of the University of Oregon. “Immediate effects would have been in the North and East, producing shockwaves, heat, flooding, wildfires, and a reduction and fragmentation of the human population.”
Any Clovis survivors would have been driven into isolated groups in search of food and warmth. Kennett said archaeological evidence at the Clovis sites is “suggestive of significant population reduction and fragmentation, but additional work is necessary to test the data further.”
One thing is for sure, “It was a bad day in North America for those folks who were living there,” Kennett said in a telephone interview.
The evidence for a comet impact is substantial.
“I think the fact that there’s an impact is pretty definite. There are too many markers there for it all to be coincidence or happenstance explanations,” Firestone said, adding, “What will be debated is whether the extent of the impact was sufficient for instance to kill all of the megafauna or whether other factors were also equally important.”more
Vlad Țepeș (1123)
beautifulnightmare (850)
jojo (227)
Jeff Schoep (224)
A.W.S. CEO Jason Hiecke (185)
NSGeorgia (174)
Kyle ATB (163)
ETgohome (152)
