LIFE on Earth has suffered mass extinctions many times in its 3.5-billion-year history. In the worst of these crises, Earth came close to death: 250 million years ago, life teetered on the brink of total annihilation. In a matter of years, across the globe, at least 96 per cent of the species were snuffed out.
In the most famous of these catastrophes, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs disappeared. The death of these reptilian giants continues to exert an extraordinary grip on the human imagination. Did the dinosaurs have bad genes or was it just bad luck? And if the…
