Episode 19: Mass Extinctions and the Death of the Dinosaurs

What's that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a 7 mile wide asteroid destined to end life as we know it? No, it's another Poppy-sode heading straight for your ear holes! Don't worry, the impact of this episode probably won't disrupt the global climate causing a decades long winter. Probably. 

This week, Poppy talks us through the Big 5 Mass Extinctions. What was the world like? How did it happen? What changed afterwards? Then she gives us a deeper dive into the Chicxulub Event A.K.A. the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. 

Tuck cozily into whatever your version of a little mammalian burrow is and travel back millions of years with us to the day the dinosaurs died. 

*Content Warning*: This episode discusses topics such as animal death, climate change, and existential tragedy. Please listen with care. 

If you'd like to skip the hypothetical, the game ends at 9:28.

Sources:

• The Day the Dinosaurs Died - Kurzgesagt video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA 
• The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World  by Riley Black
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Future
• Abe, S. (2002, February 12). NASA astrobiology. NASA. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/the-great-dying/ 
• Allen, G. (2022, July 22). The late permian mass extinction explained. Discover Magazine. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-late-permian-mass-extinction-explained 
• Ross, J. R. P., & Ross, C. A. (2025, February 1). The Permian Environment. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Permian-Period/Paleoclimate 
• ExtinctZoo Podcast: The Closest Life Has Ever Come To Going Extinct, (2024, November 2)
• Pearson, M. R., Benson, R. B. J., Upchurch, P., Fröbisch, J., & Kammerer, C. F. (2013). Reconstructing the diversity of early terrestrial herbivorous tetrapods. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 372, 42–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2012.11.008 
• Bradley, S. (2017, July 31). Massive underground magma pulse caused the world’s largest mass-extinction. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/greenhouse-gas-caused-the-worlds-largest-mass-extinction-say-geologists/ 
• Black, R. (2020, September 15). Why birds survived, and dinosaurs went extinct, after an asteroid hit earth | smithsonian. smithsonianmag.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-birds-survived-and-dinosaurs-went-extinct-after-asteroid-hit-earth-180975801/ 
• Zheng, X., Wang, X., Sullivan, C., Zhang, X., Zhang, F., Wang, Y., Li, F., & Xu, X. (2018). Exceptional dinosaur fossils reveal early origin of avian-style digestion. Scientific Reports, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-32202-x 
• Sanders, R. (2024, June 11). Our earliest primate ancestors rapidly spread after dinosaur extinction. Berkeley News. https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/24/our-earliest-primate-ancestors-rapidly-spread-after-dinosaur-extinction/ 

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