Mike Benton is a paleontologist wannabe from Merry Old England. He believes that
lava and gases from a volcanic event wiped out the flora and fauna of the Permian.
Mike argues that as a matter of fact acid rain from the Siberian Traps killed ALL plant
life on Earth.
So what was left, Mike? Did God create the Triassic flora from scratch again? Is this
what you're proposing?
No. Mike proposes that the fittest survived. That's what he was taught to memorize
by rote in school and that's what he preaches. Mike can only think of two ways to
produce a mass extinction:
- "If it's not impact, then the next most obvious, dramatic instant kind
of catastrophe is initiated by volcanic eruptions of some kind."
So, that's it! That's as far as his brain will go.
| Mike Benton |
| Gofer Mike busy at his regular job at the Bristol Paleo Dept. |
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| To comment on any of the pages in this website go to: Rational Scientific Method |
| The History of Life on Earth |
But that's the most rational part of his presentation. What he says next should cause you to wonder about
his state of mind because he seems to mean it. He urges you to believe that we descend from Lystrosaurus...
or maybe it was from Thrinaxodon, I forgot which...
My God! And this guy works at the Paleontology Faculty? In a university? Didn't he learn that Lystro and
Thrinax became extinct? Do we descend from the dead? What animal did either of these beasts spawn
that gave origin to us? An archosaur?
Let's be honest. Mike is just a librarian, an office errand boy who mans the copiers and files files in the file
cabinet. He's a gofer for the secretaries... pizzas and coffee and all that... He has as much imagination as
a carrot. Like most paleo-mathemagicians Mike does a great job of cataloguing and naming bones, though.
He's a world class stamp collector. Among his achievements, Mike can boast of having catalogued all the
agents and mechanisms for extinction that the paleomathemagicians have proposed over the years. That's
all he can show for his 30 years or so of 'hard' work running the corridors. Does this make him a
paleontologist? Not by a long shot!
It ain't all bad, though. Among all the crap that Mike spews out, he does have a bright spot here and there.
For instance, Mike describes the mechanism of the overturning of the ecological pyramid quite accurately.
Unfortunately, he wasn't smart enough to figure out that he had just figured out the mechanism of a mass
extinction. He failed to realize that volcanoes and asteroids are unnecessary to trigger the collapse of
plant life. So, like his colleagues at the Math Klub, Mike keeps searching eternally for that flashy Hollywood
scene where the ground cracks open and lava and gases gush out... or for the special effect where the
asteroid bangs the Earth. He seeks a catastrophic Act of God to explain what needs no catastrophic Act
of God at all.
