Dante
We Are The Third Man
Paleontology - The Cephalopods Are Coming - PW - By Peter Ward - May 29, 2026
Fossil records reveal Earth’s mass extinctions are followed by a rise of ocean cephalopods. They’re rising again.
Mass extinctions, global climate changes, have all been around before some creature evolved into man. This we know. How? Science. The development of societies and population growth contribute to more and more pollution on the Earth, in the waterways, in the food-chain, and in the atmosphere. This fact is undeniable. Man has to be contributing to what this article is speaking about. How can man not be a part of it? How?
The quaint seaside village of Lyme Regis is precariously perched between rugged black cliffs in southwestern England. It sits astride one of the most famous fossil sites in the world. On an autumn day several years ago, I left behind the crowded streets of souvenir shops selling fossils and T-shirts. I walked along the cliffs and over the ribbed rocks underlying the beach, stepping across one of the most devastating mass extinctions of the geological record.
The fossils beneath the village represent the end of the Triassic geological period. Around 200 million years ago, great gouts of deep Earth material welled out of volcanoes. As it flowed across land and sea bottom, it decanted enormous volumes of carbon dioxide. Mixed with the late Triassic atmosphere, it caused global temperatures to skyrocket.
But it was not heat alone that stressed the world into one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth history. The warming planet reduced the temperature differential between polar and equatorial regions. A consequence was a slowing of the important ocean currents called Thermohaline Circulation Currents. These are the drivers of oxygenating the oceans. When they slow and then halt, mass extinction follows. The living Triassic world, home to early dinosaurs, invertebrates, strange plants, and so much else, became a death world—on land, in the sea, in the skies.
Fossil records reveal Earth’s mass extinctions are followed by a rise of ocean cephalopods. They’re rising again.
Mass extinctions, global climate changes, have all been around before some creature evolved into man. This we know. How? Science. The development of societies and population growth contribute to more and more pollution on the Earth, in the waterways, in the food-chain, and in the atmosphere. This fact is undeniable. Man has to be contributing to what this article is speaking about. How can man not be a part of it? How?
The quaint seaside village of Lyme Regis is precariously perched between rugged black cliffs in southwestern England. It sits astride one of the most famous fossil sites in the world. On an autumn day several years ago, I left behind the crowded streets of souvenir shops selling fossils and T-shirts. I walked along the cliffs and over the ribbed rocks underlying the beach, stepping across one of the most devastating mass extinctions of the geological record.
The fossils beneath the village represent the end of the Triassic geological period. Around 200 million years ago, great gouts of deep Earth material welled out of volcanoes. As it flowed across land and sea bottom, it decanted enormous volumes of carbon dioxide. Mixed with the late Triassic atmosphere, it caused global temperatures to skyrocket.
But it was not heat alone that stressed the world into one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth history. The warming planet reduced the temperature differential between polar and equatorial regions. A consequence was a slowing of the important ocean currents called Thermohaline Circulation Currents. These are the drivers of oxygenating the oceans. When they slow and then halt, mass extinction follows. The living Triassic world, home to early dinosaurs, invertebrates, strange plants, and so much else, became a death world—on land, in the sea, in the skies.
