The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

>“The climate impact was enormous,” Robertson says. “Dust and soot from the impact and fires would have created an ‘impact winter’ with zero sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth for a year or so.”

>"Organisms that had somehow managed to survive the intense heat and fires now faced a new threat. “Loss of sunlight would have eliminated the phytoplankton base of almost all aquatic food chains and caused complete collapse of aquatic ecosystems,” ... All told, what evolution took over 180 million years to build up could have been cut back in less than the lifetime of an individual Tyrannosaurus rex. Death came quickly at the end of the Cretaceous."

>"... Pollen and plankton, Robertson points out, actually provide a more refined picture of what happened in the wake of the impact. Nevertheless, the available fossil record shows that about 75 percent of known species completely disappeared, and things probably weren’t rosy for the survivors. “It’s is reasonable to suppose that the 25 percent of surviving species had near-total mortality,” ...but these fortunate organisms were the ones that would go on to set the stage for the next 66 million years of evolutionary history."

[1[]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happened-...