When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time
Thames and Hudson: 2003. 336 pp. £16.95, $29.95
But there is a deeper reason for linking the two episodes: Benton wants to show us how the catastrophist perspective has re-emerged in modern geology and palaeontology. He argues that the theory of catastrophic mass extinctions was widely accepted in the early nineteenth century, but was then driven underground by the gradualist perspective of Charles Lyell's uniformitarian geology and Darwin's theory of evolution. Only in the 1970s was catastrophism revived, through the claim that the dinosaurs were wiped out when an asteroid hit the Earth. Benton shows us how in the 1990s the evidence began to emerge that the species replacements marking the Permian–Triassic transition were also sudden, and hence were probably caused by some environmental trauma. He is describing both a geologically sudden event and a rapid transformation in our ideas about the Earth's past.
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