All this "story" really shows....
...is just how hard it is to get your brain around Deep Time and probability. Because in truth the conclusion is about as surprising as being told that water is wet.
What is easy to overlook is just how immense Deep Time is. Set against that, and given that the possibility that the dinosaurs as a whole could be wiped out at any particular point was always small, but also always greater than zero, the probability that they would be wiped out by *something*, *sometime* was always 100%. The only question was how long it would take, and whether whatever it was would wipe out life on the planet entirely. And more to the point, it was always likely to take some form of rare, extreme catastrophe to give the final push - because life is *good* at surviving, and simply works around anything less.
In the end, it took getting on for 17 *million* years for the something to happen; and life here, as a whole, survived. The truly big surprise, if there is one, ought to be not that the dinosaurs eventually died out through "bad luck", but that it took so long for that to happen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
