The Mass Extinction Debates: A Science Communication Odyssey

In which the dinosaurs go extinct and 66 million years later people get angry about it.

What killed the dinosaurs? Maybe you think you know.

Many others thought they knew. They saw hundreds of years of scientific progress, shifting paradigms, and explosive arguments behind them, and decided they were at the end. The K-Pg extinction was settled. Then it exploded again. And again. And it kept exploding way more than any layperson today really appreciates, revealing more about science and its communication than you ever imagined.

This is the story of the mass extinction debates.

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Special thanks to Alex Grab for the awesome rock arrangement of Fossils from Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals:
   • Saint-Saens in Rock - The Carnival of...  

Special thanks to Dr Christopher Scotese for granting me permission to use maps from the PALEOMAP Project:
   / @cscotese  

0:00 - Intro
5:17 - Part I: The End
28:40 - Part II: The Record of the Rocks
47:46 - Part III: A Sudden Violent and Unusual Event
1:18:29 - Part IV: Exterminate All Dinosaurs With This One Weird Trick!
1:46:42 - Part V: Confessions of a YouTuber
2:10:05 - Credits

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LINKS MENTIONED

Recent review about the dinosaurs' extinction:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/f...

Jefferson's mammoth cheese:
   • The Strange Tale of Jefferson's Mammo...  

Darren Naish on another palaeontological paradigm dust-up:
https://web.archive.org/web/201207051...

Michael J. Benton on the history of the dinosaurs' extinction:
https://bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.b...

The Alvarez paper on asteroids:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1683699

The Vogt paper on volcanoes:
https://www.nature.com/articles/240338a0

My Pythagoras video:
   • How Pythagoras Broke Music (and how w...  

Neil Halloran's video on nuclear winter:
   • The Controversial Science of Nuclear ...  

Kyle Hill's video on YouTube science spam:
   • YouTube’s Science Scam Crisis  

Elisabeth S. Clemens on the debates:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/285026

Interview with William Glen:
   • UNSCIENTIFIC LEARNING: PARADIGM INERTIA  

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A full list of sources and credits can be found here:
https://oliverlugg.com/the-mass-extin...

Raw data from my survey is available here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

If you're looking for even more, I've written a blog post about the production, omissions and reception of this video:
https://oliverlugg.com/further-confes...