The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
It should be emphasized that these mass extinctions are not in-
stantaneous, or even brief, events. They extend over periods of tens
of millions of years. . . . This makes the phenomenon all the more
mysterious, because we have to think of environmental changes that
not only affected a great many different groups in different environ-
ments, but also did so very slowly and very persistently. The only
general and true statement that can now be made about, say, the ex-
tinction of the dinosaurs is that they all lost adaptation in the course
of some long environmental change the nature of which is entirely
unknown (390:302).
If the dinosaurs lost adaptation, it was not because they
changed. The same is true of the sabertooth cat, which had a
life span of 40,000,000 years and, according to Simpson, was
apparently as well adapted at the end of that period as at
the beginning (392:43-44). The gradual elimination of the
dinosaurs can be understood as the result of constant shift-
ings of the earth's crust, which eliminated these reptiles first
in one area and then in another. No doubt, dinosaurs re-
peatedly reoccupied areas from which they had previously
been eliminated, but eventually perhaps much more re-
cently than some people think they were destroyed. Being
cold-blooded creatures, of course, they would find it quite
intolerable to be shifted into the cold zones, but there is not
the slightest reason to think they were degenerate. Simpson
attacks the entire idea of degeneration of species (392:72, 81).
He quotes Rensch:
In innumerable cases lineages become extinct without there being
recognizable in the last forms any sort of morphological or patholog-
ical degenerative phenomena (390:292).
Professor Dodson gives a good example of the piecemeal
extinction of species. He cites the case of the mastodonts,
relatives of the elephants, which became extinct first in the
old world and then in the new (115:371). Other examples
could be cited from the Pleistocene, when many species became
extinct in the Americas, while their close relatives, such
as horses, camels, and various kinds of elephants, survived
in the Eastern Hemisphere. Now one might ask the question,