Science Quote by Robert T. Bakker

“Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction” is Bakker doing what good contrarian scientists do: yanking the story away from a single, cinematic culprit and back into messy systems. The line’s power is its plainness. No asteroid pyrotechnics, no one villain. Just geography, movement, and germs - the unglamorous machinery of catastrophe.

Bakker’s intent is to widen the causal frame around mass extinction. Land bridges imply lowered sea levels and rearranged continents, turning oceans from barriers into highways. “Many species were spreading” reads like an ecological stress test: sudden contact between previously isolated faunas, new competitors, new predators, and disrupted food webs. Then comes the quiet knife twist: “many diseases.” Pathogens are the perfect subtextual menace because they scale invisibly. When populations collide, infections don’t merely tag along; they can become the main event, exploiting immunologically naive hosts and fragmented habitats.

Contextually, Bakker has long pushed against simplistic narratives in paleontology, especially the tendency to treat deep time like a detective story with one smoking gun. This quote sits in that tradition: extinction as convergence, not climax. It also smuggles in a contemporary echo. The same ingredients - connectivity, mobility, novel contacts - define modern vulnerability. Bakker isn’t moralizing, but he’s reminding us that when worlds connect too fast, biology doesn’t negotiate. It cascades.