Softening up the Beachhead was a phenomenon used to explain what caused extinction aside from rapid change. The theory was that animals did not go extinct immediately after a major environmental shift such as an Ice age, but after. Ian Malcom postulated that such extinctions were the result of the species having been weakened by the environmental change to cope when their environment returned to normal. Malcom also revealed that there was no answer to this phenomenon, as it was still regarded as a paleontological mystery.
