Comment: In short, "nothing to worry about, go back to sleep". Funny that they come out with this at the present moment.

It is well known that there are other major extinctions and the cycle is not ONLY every 62 million years! There is also a very strong signal for a 26 million year extinction cycle. The different estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years are due mainly to what the individual researcher chooses as the threshold for naming an extinction event as "major" as well as what set of data he selects as the determinant measure of past diversity. As it happens, the 62 million event data stems mainly from marine fossil evidence.

The classical "Big Five" mass extinctions identified by Raup and Sepkoski in 1982 are widely agreed upon as some of the most significant. They are:

The late Ordovician period (about 438 million years ago) - 100 families extinct - more than half of the bryozoan and brachiopod species extinct.

78 million years later:

The late Devonian (about 360 mya) - 30% of animal families extinct.

106 million years later:

At the end of the Permian period (about 245 mya) - Trilobites go extinct. 50% of all animal families, 95% of all marine species, and many trees die out.

37 million years later:

The late Triassic (208 mya) - 35% of all animal families die out. Most early dinosaur families went extinct, and most synapsids died out (except for the mammals).

143 million years later:

At the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary (about 65 mya) - about half of all life forms died out, including the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, ammonites, many families of fishes, clams, snails, sponges, sea urchins and many others.

As you can see from the above, using the number "62 million years" and building a theory on it is really a bit misleading.

Raup and Sepkoski are mentioned as identifying the "Big Five", but the fact is that Sepkoski, a University of Chicago paleontologist suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was part of a 26 million year cycle!! However, I would like to mention that if you multiply the 26: 3 X 26 is 78 - which just happens to be the time between the Ordovician and Devonian extinctions; 4 X 26 is 104 which is very close to the 106 million years between the Devonian and Permian extinctions; and 5 X 26 is 130, which (when dealing with these kinds of numbers) is close enough to the gap between the Triassic and K-T extinction to be in the ballpark. So, maybe there is something to this 26 million year thing after all, only each "return" has varying effects based on many other solar system variables. A companion star with a 26 million year orbit might be more stable, since Muller has suggested that a 62 million year orbit is too great to be stable.

As it happens, if we postulate the 26 million year orbit of a Companion Star, we would find that there ought to be a return about 39 million years ago, and then another 13 million years ago, which would put us half-way in the Companion star orbit cycle.

For more details read: Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!

Comment: As for Sir William Herschel - from this link. Also drop 'Planet X' or 'The 12th Planet' and add 'Dark Companion Brown Dwarf Star' on the linked website and you see a picture that has been hidden from us start to form.

New York Times
January 30, 1983

Something out there beyond the farthest reaches of the known solar system seems to be tugging at Uranus and Neptune. Some gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object that may be the long- sought Planet X. ... The last time a serious search of the skies was made it led to the discovery in 1930 of Pluto, the ninth planet. But the story begins more than a century before that, after the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the English astronomer and musician William Herschel. Until then, the planetary system seemed to end with Saturn.

As astronomers observed Uranus, noting irregularities in its orbital path, many speculated that they were witnessing the gravitational pull of an unknown planet. So began the first planetary search based on astronomers predictions, which ended in the 1840's with the discovery of Neptune almost simultaneously by English, French, and German astronomers. But Neptune was not massive enough to account entirely for the orbital behavior of Uranus. Indeed, Neptune itself seemed to be affected by a still more remote planet. In the last 19th century, two American astronomers, Willian H. Pickering and Percival Lowell, predicted the size and approximate location of the trans-Neptunian body, which Lowell called Planet X. Years later, Pluto was detected by Clyde W. Tombaugh working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Several astronomers, however, suspected it might not be the Planet X of prediction. Subsequent observation proved them right. Pluto was too small to change the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the combined mass of Pluto and its recently discovered satellite, Charon, is only 1/5 that of Earth's moon.

Recent calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by "a single undiscovered planet". He and a colleague, Dr. Richard Harrington, calculate that the 10th planet should be two to five times more massive than Earth and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto - hardly next-door but still within the gravitational influence of the Sun. ...

Comment: If you believe that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean, that is.