Sixty-six million years ago, 70 percent of all species on land and in the seas, including the dinosaurs, suddenly went extinct, in the disastrous aftermath of the collision of a large asteroid or comet with the Earth. Subsequently, paleontologists discovered that such mass extinctions of marine life, in which up to 90 percent of species disappeared, were not random events, but seemed to come in a 26-million-year cycle. In their Historical Biology study, Rampino and co-authors Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Yuhong Zhu of NYU’s Center for Data Science, examined the record of mass extinctions of...