Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert T. Bakker

Bakker is doing what good scientists do in public: puncturing the lazy story that “everything died” and replacing it with a more conditional, ecosystem-specific picture. The first sentence sketches a tempting headline narrative - synchronized catastrophe, land and sea locked in the same doom loop. Then he undercuts it with a pivot that matters: the Ice Age shows a mismatch. Lots of big land animals vanish; sea-faring ones mostly don’t. That “then again” isn’t a shrug, it’s a methodological warning label.

The intent is comparative and corrective. Bakker points to a pattern (coincident extinctions) only to insist that patterns have boundaries. Marine and terrestrial worlds can be coupled by global shocks - climate swings, volcanism, ocean chemistry changes, asteroid impacts - but they don’t always respond in the same way, on the same clock, or with the same vulnerability. The Ice Age example quietly argues for mechanism over melodrama: if sea mammals largely survive while mammoths and ground sloths don’t, the culprit can’t be a single, uniform “extinction force.” It suggests geography, food webs, human hunting pressure, habitat fragmentation, and reproductive pace mattered differently on land than at sea.

Subtextually, Bakker is also nudging readers to respect scale and sampling. The fossil record’s unevenness invites overconfident parallels; his contrast pushes back against the idea that extinction is one story with one moral. It’s many stories sharing a planet, occasionally overlapping, often not.