Catastrophic Events Doom Living Creatures.

• Position: MASS EXTINCTIONS

Mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals--including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds--follow a cycle of about 27,000,000 years, coinciding with previously reported mass extinctions of ocean life, according to an analysis published in the journal Historical Biology.

The study also finds that these mass extinctions align with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic outpourings of lava called flood-basalt eruptions--providing potential causes for why the extinctions occurred.

"It seems that large-body impacts and the pulses of internal Earth activity that create flood-basalt volcanism may be marching to the same 27,000,000-year drumbeat as the extinctions, perhaps paced by our orbit in the galaxy," says lead author Michael Rampino, professor in the Department of Biology at New York University.

Some 66,000,000 years ago, 70% of all species on land and in the seas, including the dinosaurs, suddenly went extinct, in the disastrous aftermath of the collision of a large asteroid or comet with the Earth. Subsequently, paleontologists discovered that such mass extinctions of marine life, in which up to 90% of species disappeared, were not random events, but seemed to come in a 26,000,000-year cycle.

Astrophysicists hypothesize that periodic comet showers occur in the solar system every 26,000,000 to 30,000,000 years, producing cyclical impacts...