The success of the dinosaurs after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction may be why they did not survive the second extinction.
And, without the buttress of renown that the bird later had, the dodo could not be protected from a kind of second extinction.
No sooner was young Brian hooked on dinosaurs than this iconic representative suffered a second extinction — at the hands of science.
About two hundred and ninety years later in Siberia, I saw few or none of these marvels, except in museums, where some of the specimens are facing a second extinction from moths and general disintegration.
Simon Wotton, a conservation scientist with the RSPB, said: "In the late 1990s, the bittern was heading towards a second extinction in the UK, largely because its preferred habitat – wet reedbed – was drying out and required intensive management, restoration and habitat recreations.
Small populations, among other factors, stifled evolution among the surviving species, rendering them vulnerable to a series of rapid and profound changes in climate that eventually claimed the entire group in a second extinction about 94 million years ago. .
