THE COCKROACH SECRET

by Larry O'Hanlon

One day you're a dominant lifeform on the planet. The next day you're roach food. That's what can happen when Earth has a bad day, by which I mean a bad year, century or hundreds of millennia. Hard times can spell the end for large swaths of life. Each mass extinction episode goes something like this: Something happens and entire lineages are cut short, ended forever, finito.

But there is a brighter side to these sad sagas. Many species survive too. This fact is underrated, usually because we're too busy getting weirded out by the strange beasts that bit the dust. But the survivors are screaming something important at us: It's the secret to surviving mass extinctions. To find out what the survivors are trying to tell us, I asked paleontologist Spencer Lucas of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The following is Lucas' quick list of the key traits for not going extinct when others are winking out and turning into fossil fodder.

Credit: NASA