Lucy in Disguise... With Glasses

Fossil records reveal Earth’s mass extinctions are followed by a rise of ocean cephalopods. They’re rising again.

"As a paleontologist who has studied cephalopods and mass extinctions for more than five decades now, I see signs of that story today, similar in ways both familiar and horrifying. It is as if our world is like the one at the end of the Triassic. Signs point toward a mass extinction, the sixth in the geological time of animals, that is either completed or heading toward finality in our ocean communities.

Once again, we are in a warming world; once again, ocean currents that supply oxygen are slowing; once again, a significant proportion of marine predators, such as the predatory bony and cartilaginous fish, are disappearing. And once again, the cephalopods are flourishing, blooming like weeds, as they fill the ecological niches of the ocean animals around them being wiped out"

-Peter Ward, a professor of biology and Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington.