End of the "Lone Asteroid" Theory?

hussar writes "This BBC article reports on research that suggests the dinosaurs were not killed off by the Chicxulub asteroid's immediate effects but ultimately fell to evironmental stresses caused by a second asteroid that hit about 300,000 years later. The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean."

Comments

Keller's Conclusions Strongly Refuted

[Punchinello]

Gerta Keller's conclusions are being strongly refuted by Jan Smits, one of the researchers that got funding for the core samples used in the study. He said in this NPR clip that he is really upset that Keller's research passed peer review without catching the obvious mistakes.

Re:Keller's Conclusions Strongly Refuted

[MuParadigm]

This is *one* study as opposed to many studies tending to confirm the theory. I doubt it's conclusive.

This isn't to say that it's wrong, but I think it's obvious that Keller's paper certainly shouldn't be accepted as definitive unless and until studies confirming it are undertaken and reported.

Re:Keller's Conclusions Strongly Refuted

[anantherous coward]

The significance of publication in a peer reviewed journal should not be overestimated as the press seems to do so often.

I remember from about 10 years ago that an article on letter on equidistant letter spacing in the Bible (I.e. Bible Codes) was published in "Statistical Science" -- a recongized peer reviewed journal. I also recall that those who approved the article did not agree with it. The reason for publishing it was because they could not refute the mathematics in it. It was a sufficiently interesting finding and methods to merit publication. The work was later effectively refuted, as most knew it would be -- the hypothesis was nutty.

The point here is that Keller's work may have merited publication even if we regard it likely that he is wrong. I don't know one way or the other myself. I guess I am reacting a little bit to the idea that Smits is upset that Keller was even published. It smells of censorship. But maybe he is right.

Less Violent End?

[ackthpt]

I caught this story on the BBC World News, Monday morning, along with the theories of the extinction of Aristide's presidency.

Back when I took astronomy the standard theories were carted out before us for our own inspection and consideration.

I've not been convinced climatic change did them in as most theories seemed predisposed to a direct impact on the dinosaurse themselves. i.e. the earth passed through the tail of a comet and the atmosphere cooled and they died off. I'm more inclined to some environmental change which impacted the low end of the food chain, plants in particular, but it still doesn't explain why aquatic dinos went, too.

I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again, one study observed plants are taking up the extra carbondioxide in the air, what's the long term impact of that?) As the carbon became buried (ever think about how much green stuff it took to make pertroleum deposits or coal seams?) the food changed and those at the bottom of the chain adapted or perished. Perhaps dinosaurs were really hugely inefficient creatures and require large amounts of energy, whereas mammals and birds are quite efficient.

Anyway, that's my two cents. Anyone who can point me toward some theories which follow that logic, as opposed to the big-exciting-asteroid-or-comet theories much appreciated. I think in extinction theories, the ones involving some violent cataclysm get too much press, probably due to the sensational value.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, "fossil fuels" did not come from plants or dinosaurs.... Nitrifying bacteria consumes rock and the byproduct is tar, oil etc. The bacteria uses the carbon in the soil/atmosphere to facilitate the reaction.
I can't believe they still teach that oil came from Dinos in our schools...

Re:Less Violent End?

[mc6809e]

I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again, one study observed plants are taking up the extra carbondioxide in the air, what's the long term impact of that?) As the carbon became buried (ever think about how much green stuff it took to make pertroleum deposits or coal seams?) the food changed and those at the bottom of the chain adapted or perished.

So you're saying that, basically, as carbon was drawn out of the atmosphere and put into what are now coal seams and oil fields, plant productivity was reduced. This reduction made food less available for dinosaurs and so they perished. Interesting theory.

There have been studies showing that many plants are CO2 limited. When CO2 is increased, plant biomass increases greatly. Conversely, the less CO2 available, the less productive the plants are.

Seems to be compatible with your theory.

Re:Less Violent End?

[ackthpt]

Actually, "fossil fuels" did not come from plants or dinosaurs.... Nitrifying bacteria consumes rock and the byproduct is tar, oil etc. The bacteria uses the carbon in the soil/atmosphere to facilitate the reaction. I can't believe they still teach that oil came from Dinos in our schools...

Not dinos, but plant matter, the most prominent example of this process ongoing today are peat-bogs. North of where I lived in Michigan were muskegs, effectively small lakes which eventually filled in with mosses. Assmume this process continues for some time, building up a dense layer of dead moss at the bottom, as new moss continues to grow on top, then a glacier (like the ice age) deposits a cap of sand/gravel/clay on top of it and over successive millenia that layer continues to be overlayed by sediments, etc. Examination of coal often reveals the plant matter it was made from. Consider a 1 meter thick coal seam and the kind of pressure upon it, what was the original dept of this accumulation of plant matter?

Re:Less Violent End?

[PrionPryon]

Do you have any papers you could recommend that discuss this behaviour?

Re:Less Violent End?

[Illserve]

Mammals aren't particularly efficient. In fact it's damned expensive to keep our homeostatic mechanisms in place.

It's worth it of course, active temperature regulation lets us stay awake during the night and has let our neurons become more delicately tuned (and therefore we're smarter than cold blooded critters).

But it's a mistake to assume that we're more efficient from an energy perspective. You spend a huge chunk of you caloric input keeping your extremeties warm, and your brain cool. It's like your own personal environment suit built into your body. Lots of advantages, but very expensive to operate.

Now maybe their extreme size made dinosaurs less efficient, but I tend to think it's that being cold blooded they are less resistant to climactic change. A period of dynamic weather, with patterns changing faster than migration could handle, would tend to be very bad for anything cold blooded.

Also consider, before warm blooded things came about, nighttime must have been very safe and quiet in large areas of the world. All of a sudden warm blooded critters arrive on the scene and find this amazing niche, namely eating sleeping dinosaurs at night :)

Re:Less Violent End?

[cens0r]

I thought there was a lot of debate about whether or not dinosaurs were cold blooded? Most recent studies I've seen show that many of the dinosaurs had feathers, and most likely were closer to ostriches than reptiles. This means they were just as likely to be warm blooded as cold blooded.

Re:Less Violent End?

[ackthpt]

There have been studies showing that many plants are CO2 limited. When CO2 is increased, plant biomass increases greatly. Conversely, the less CO2 available, the less productive the plants are.

Which, on first look, would seem to cover the extinction of aquatic dinos, too. As their food became less plentiful. Those which adapted to the changing food chain survived. That there were some very large carnivores suggests to me that they prospered on a readily available supply of food.

Re:Less Violent End?

[rolofft]

>...fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again...

Land vegetation, oceans, and volcanoes put about 200 billion tons of CO2 into the air, compared to 6 billion tons from humans. If we're going to avoid the fate of the dinos, somebody needs to get Monntserrat and Krakatau to ratify Kyoto.

Re:Less Violent End?

[ackthpt]

Mammals aren't particularly efficient. In fact it's damned expensive to keep our homeostatic mechanisms in place. It's worth it of course, active temperature regulation lets us stay awake during the night and has let our neurons become more delicately tuned (and therefore we're smarter than cold blooded critters)....

You have to keep in mind that humans are one of the few bare mammals. Also that as we're mobile and adaptive, we can live as well in the arctic as the equatorial by modifying living habits, clothing and shelter. Mammals in their native habitat are pretty well tuned to survive its extremes.

Re:Less Violent End?

[ackthpt]

I thought there was a lot of debate about whether or not dinosaurs were cold blooded? Most recent studies I've seen show that many of the dinosaurs had feathers, and most likely were closer to ostriches than reptiles. This means they were just as likely to be warm blooded as cold blooded.

Based upon observation of like present day creatues I'm inclined to these argements:

Dinos were cold blooded and lived in a hothouse climate.

Dinos were warm blooded and required high caloric intake.

That some were found to nest suggests more than simply protecting the eggs, they were keeping them warm. These were not buried nests, but on the surface, exposed. How would a cold blooded animal keep an egg warm?

Re:Less Violent End?

[Malc]

"I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface"

Wouldn't that be contrary to existing theories about the carboniferous period, which occured more than 250 million years prior to the K-T bounday? Maybe not.

Limestones and other sedimentary rocks high in calcium lock away a lot of carbon and oxygen in the form of CaCO3. I wonder how much impact the periods of high limestone production had on the environment including surface level CO2. Of course, right before the Tertiary period we had the Cretaceous - a period of high sea levels and warm temperatures, and distinctively marked in many places by chalk beds.

Re:Less Violent End?

[teromajusa]

I read my kids' dinosaur books, so I know all about this! :D

The warmblooded and coldblooded dicontomy is not accurate. Different creatures manage body temerature in different ways. Some do very little, and we call them cold blooded, and some do quiet alot and we call them warmblooded. Many dinosaurs, according to the latest childrens literature, were probably somewhere inbetween.

Re:Less Violent End?

[teromajusa]

That some were found to nest suggests more than simply protecting the eggs, they were keeping them warm.

Modern reptiles, such as crocodiles, lay eggs in nests. So do fish. I don't think that really says much one way or the other about the issue.

Re:Less Violent End?

[visgoth]

I agree, a catostropic impact would kill off more than just dinosaurs. If there really was a prolonged "nuclear winter" due to the dust kicked up by the impact, wouldn't the entire marine foodchain have been killed off as well? The most basic element (to my understanding) in said foodchain is photosynthetic algea, which feeds larger plankton, which feeds larger and larger creatures down the line. Cut off the sun, and the stuff at the bottom becomes scarce, starving off everything else up the line.

Two "minor" impacts causing successive climate changes, and shifts in the type and abundance of plant life sounds more plausible. The energy requirements of those huge beasts were very high. My guess is that plants changed to be less energy rich, and this led to the downfall of the dinos.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love all of this mental masturbation

Re:Less Violent End?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now maybe their extreme size made dinosaurs less efficient, but I tend to think it's that being cold blooded they are less resistant to climactic change.

There is more evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded like birds than cold-blodded reptiles. Also, most dinosaurs were the size of modern day chickens.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Anonymous Coward]

You misunderstood him. He said the eggs were on the surface, not buried, meaning that body heat was required to keep them warm. Cold blooded reptiles bury their eggs in the ground or under mounds, and the egg's temperatures are thus regulated. Hence, eggs on the surface, in nests, implies that these animals were like birds, and were warm blooded.

Re:Less Violent End?

[cens0r]

of course the kids books are always a little behind the times. When my little brother was a kid (less than 10 years ago) books still had t-rex walking upright and referred to the 'brontosaurus'.

Re:Less Violent End?

[R2.0]

The process you are describing is the generation of coal, NOT oil. Just because they are both called "fossil fuels" doesn't mean they are related.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Imperator]

That some were found to nest suggests more than simply protecting the eggs, they were keeping them warm. These were not buried nests, but on the surface, exposed. How would a cold blooded animal keep an egg warm?

But perhaps the cold blooded animal could insulate the eggs. The idea being that it could cover the eggs with an area of its body where the skin was a good insulator of heat. (Obviously this can't be the whole skin, otherwise it couldn't be a cold blooded animal.) If the eggs needed an infusion of heat, the parent could generate it through friction; say, by rubbing a limb against the eggs.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about. What did you expect on slashdot?

Re:Less Violent End?

[ccady]

And you are quite certain that the extra 3% that we put into the air is not harmful? Pray, back that up with a fact.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Imperator]

Of course there are natural sources of CO2. (And BTW, it's not vegetation, but animals, that produces CO2. Plants convert CO2 into O2, (very) roughly speaking.) The point is that there's a natural balance of CO2 sources and sinks. Humans are adding CO2 without providing for anything that removes it. You'd expect that biological CO2 sinks would prosper and make up for the glut of CO2, but humans are turning land that was rich with vegetation into land for human development. So we're reducing CO2 absorbtion and increasing CO2 production.

Look at the rise of CO2 in our atmosphere and tell me again that it's all to be blamed on volcanoes.

Re:Less Violent End?

[OldAndSlow]

If there really was a prolonged "nuclear winter" due to the dust kicked up by the impact, wouldn't the entire marine foodchain have been killed off as well?

The papers referenced by the BBC article indicate a 70% extinction of all plankton at the K-T boundary. That's about as low in the food chain as you can go.

Re:Less Violent End?

[rolofft]

I'm not condoning pollution. I'm saying I wish the EPA could have been around to protect dinosaurs from volcanic emissions during the Cretaceous period. I wish Greenpeace could have done something about the wholesale slaughter of 95% of Earth's species at the end of the Paleozoic Era. It's humbling and frightening to see just how truly Mother Nature does not share our moral sensibilities.

"Comets giveth and comets taketh away." - Carl Sagan

Re:Less Violent End?

[soup]

So, would a less aggressive form of thermal regulation result in tepid-blooded lifeforms?

Re:Less Violent End?

[eggstasy]

Well, why would you need to keep the egg warm in a "hothouse climate"? Or at all? Is it totally impossible that dinosaurs could very well develop and hatch at room temperature?
Besides, body heat isnt required to warm something up. Mere insulation will do it. As in, let the egg catch some rays during the day, and insulate it with your body after dark.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Cytotoxic]

My theory of dinosaurs is this. This is my theory, and it belongs to me, and to me alone. Here is my theory of dinsaurs:

Dinosaurs are quite small at one end. Then, they get quite a bit larger in the middle. Finally, they are quite small agian on the far end.

This is my theory of dinosaurs, which belongs to me.

My apologies to the boys from Python.

Re:Less Violent End?

[rolofft]

You're right that my post confused fauna with flora. And volcanism does only account for around 3% of CO2 production nowadays. The Cretaceous, of course, was a different story. You still can't discount the effect of a single erruption emitting tens of thousands of tons of CO2 all at once.

70,000 people in the 20th century were killed by volcanos. Popocatepetl could do a lot more environmental damage in a single day than Exxon Mobil could do in decades. Why do environmentalists quake in fear of Exxon, but smile at old Popo? Nature is our enemy.

You wouldn't go so far with your fear of anthropengic CO2 as to advocate stopping the removal of toxic petroleum from our national parks, would you? If we've learned anything from the dinosaurs it should be eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow Deccan Traps will cause a nuclear winter, a giant meteor will strike, a nearby star will go supernova, or methane will belch from the sea.

P.S. Most of this post was meant to be sarcastic.

Re:Less Violent End?

[ankhank]

>carbon became buried ... Permian extinction -- greenhouse period, increase in rainfall and enormous increase in consequent erosion, most organic material washed into the oceans, most living things died. Recent excellent discussion: When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time by Michael Benton

Re:Less Violent End?

[Imperator]

Well, we don't control volcanoes. (The CIA does, and it uses them to produce black helicopters.) But seriously, we worry about what environmental damage we can control. With volcanoes, we're more worried about predicting them so we can move people out of the way.

Re:Less Violent End?

[rolofft]

Oh, reducing CO2 emissions is useless, Imperator. Once the sun burns out, this planet is doomed. You're just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Fallen_Knight]

I agree, I don't give a damn about CO2, Stop it or produce more. I don't care. bad? good? who knows. Neither has been proven.

But i would like us to stop useing fossil fuels for the OTHER more DANGEROUS emmisions that DO pose a HEALTH threat to humans. I don't see why theres this big deal about CO2 when coal power plants put radioactive material into the air every day, cars put out pollution (NOT CO2 mind you) that is proven to be bad for the enviroment and out health.

So wtf is with poeple and their CO2 obsession?? the kyto accord should have focus on reduceing the amount of fossial fuels used by a country, not CO2 produced. (thats assumeing you could call it a "fair" treaty)

hmm its fun to bitch about how silly and stupid the goverment is!! i should do it more often.

Re:Less Violent End?

[connorbd]

You are correct. The marine foodchain wasn't completely destroyed, but it was in bad shape -- that's why we don't have plesiosaurs anymore.

Re:Less Violent End?

[Paradise Pete]

One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.

I'm sure I'm just being dense, but I don't get it.

Re:Less Violent End?

[kuiken]

Many studies have shown that the neto co2 absobsion by plants is 0, at night they absorb O2 and release CO2 and the left over inbalance get released after the plant dies.
Ofcourse the burning down of forrests totaly screw this ballance up be releaseing CO2 that would otherwise be kept within the floral system at a verry fast riad.
This and the biodiversaty ofcourse doesnt sell stickers so greenpeace and co rather sell the lungs of the earth myth

Ah, memories..

[grub]

This brings back memories.

I remember having a beer at my buddy Vijay's place in India (he was an outsourced Fern & Brush Maintainer for the Pangea Shrubbery Co. in the Late Cretaceous) Anyhow, I was working on my tan as the sun's light had only recently begun shining through to the Earth's surface thanks to the Chicxulub hit years before.

Vijay had just finished telling me a great joke about his dog having no nose when we saw a massive asteroid coming down. Vijay just muttered "Oh bugger, not again." The sad part of the whole thing was that I had tanned lying on my stomach that morning. My face and frontside were ghostly white for ages.

I was a laughing stock for most of the Tertiary period..

Re:Ah, memories..

[Anonymous Coward]

got you beat, when I was a microbe on mars we were having a ball of a time with our family when an asteroid hit. It sent half of our civilization into space, most died. But some got trapped in rocks and landed on that "earth" planet. Then they mutated into hideous monkey beings that are so arrogant most think they are the only life in the universe and that there is a master creator being called God - who is also shaped like a hideous monkey being. And now some of the hideous monkey beings have started morphing into these vicous "trolls" who make stupid jokes.

Days before life on earth, THOSE were the days.

Re:Ah, memories..

[shadowbearer]

Bah. Yo mamma was a trilobyte. Admit it.

SB

Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know there was an asteroid that came from the grassy knoll.

Only if...

[FortKnox]

If only Bruce Willis had lived back then...

Re:Only if...

[Anonymous Coward]

>If only Bruce Willis had lived back then...

Yeah, then we wouldn't have to watch his films today.

Re:Only if...

[Anonymous Coward]

KUDOS! Beat me to the punch!

Re:Only if...

[Savatte]

Surprisingly, Dick Clark was alive back then. He looked about the same as he does now.

Re:Only if...

[ackthpt]

If only Bruce Willis had lived back then...

Well, you know Shirley MacLaine did. You should ask her what happened.

Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh!

[commo1]

THIS will be going around the religious channels like wildfire. They will be pointing out how foolish the "scientific community" has been for the past 100 years of this theory and show how the bible forsaw "a deluge of heavenly matter from above". This will be going on for centuries from now. Cataclysmic, to be sure.

Nah, it couldn't have been...

[doppleganger871]

...I thought it was the evil Republicans that caused the death of them. It must have been.

Re:Nah, it couldn't have been...

[maxwell demon]

Actually, they couldn't reproduce anymore because they couldn't afford all the license fees to copy their genome ...

Re:Nah, it couldn't have been...

[JediTrainer]

Actually, they couldn't reproduce anymore because they couldn't afford all the license fees to copy their genome ...

Why are we bringing up SCO again?

hmmm

[potaz]

"from the this-changes-everything-and-nobody-cares dept."

I'm thinking maybe the dinosaurs involved cared just a little...

Re:hmmm

[fewnorms]

"from the this-changes-everything-and-nobody-cares dept."

Why would we, as a people, not care? I think it's pretty interesting to know why a complete range of species died so 'sudden'. (or not sudden, as now pointed out by the article) It might even in the long run help us prepare if such a thing ever happened in modern times... Our good earth-saving friend Bruce Willis (and hopefully Hollywood) won't be around forever.

Re:hmmm

[Cruciform]

Well, if the dinosaurs at qwantz.com die out it's just cuz they weren't funny enough :P

Re:hmmm

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I'm thinking maybe the dinosaurs involved cared just a little...

I don't know. Did you hear any of them complain?

Besides the whole asteroid thing is fake. It's just a coverup. The dino's got extinct because Fred Flintstone and Barney ate too many of them.

Obviously...

[JackHart]

Obviously it was the second asteroid on the grassy knoll!

Re:Obviously...

[pete-classic]

Oh man, why don't you fuckin' stop it? Shit, this is too fuckin' big for you, you know that? Who did the big reptiles, who killed the dinosaurs, fuck man! It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin' asteroids don't even know! Don't you get it?

-Peter

Re:Obviously...

[Walrus99]

It was the "smoking man" hiding in a manhole who actually sent the second asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Any conspiracy nut knows that.

Re:Obviously...

[pete-classic]

To the idiot who moderated this as a troll.

1. The phrase "'Lone Asteroid'" in the title of the story is a reference to the JFK "lone gunman" theory.

2. The grand parent is an acknowledgment of same.

3. My post above is a quote from the film "J.F.K." (with some topical modifications).

I respectfully request that if you simply don't understand a post in the future that you not assume that it is a troll. This sort of idiotic moderation is exactly what a large faction of slashdot trolls use as an excuse for their behavior.

Be part of the solution, not part of the fucking problem.

-Peter

Re:Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your original post was at -1, so I bumped it up to 0. I did what I could...

Re:Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is now gone because I posted while logged in, even though it was anon. *sigh*. What a system.

Re:Obviously...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

No, it was one "Magic" asteroid that hit the earth, richochet, and exited hitting the Governor.

This was on NPR yesterday and they said . . .

[JustAnotherReader]

This was on NPR yesterday and they said that there were some pretty serious flaws in the theory. One scientist went so far as to say "I don't know how this got through peer review. It should never have been published"

It may just be scientist ruffling their feathers at a new theory, or there may very well be serious problems with the evidence. It's certainly not a final answer yet.

Re:This was on NPR yesterday and they said . . .

[Dread_ed]

I heard the NPR story myself, and I must say that Gerta Keller's response to those who say she is wrong (some say so without even seeing the evidence) made me smile with delight.

Paraphrasing, she said that all she wanted was to know what actually happened, and that she was not going to waste time trying to convince people who have already made up their minds. "It's impossible" she said.

Wonderful response to the naysayers. Plus, it shows one of my favorite sides of the scientific community. Specifically, that she is dedicated to the search for the truth rather than kow-towing to the established theories that are sometimes propped up by politics in the scientific community.

Remember that when you hear one side of an argument is sounds true and correct, until you hear the other. And primogeniture has no place in the world of Ideas.

What's the matter officer? I have obeyed all of your silly Earth laws!

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[wesman83]

yeah, i could have sworn god created the earth less than 10,000 years ago... hmmm somethings fishy here.

Back the truck up...

[djupedal]

The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean

I'm checking my notes now, but as I recall, the 'Indian Ocean' wasn't there when the second one augered in. Who writes this stuff....

Re:Back the truck up...

[stratjakt]

I'd assumed that the implication was the impact created the Indian Ocean, just like the Gulf of Mexico is supposedly a big impact crater.

Re:Back the truck up...

[djupedal]

Better...but that's not how it was worded, me thinks - I didn't see the words 'created' or 'as seen today' :)

Re:Back the truck up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Geologists do not think the Gulf of Mexico is an impact crater. There is an impact crater thought by many to have been the dinosaur killer, but it is much smaller than the Gulf, and part of it is on land, the Yucatan peninsula.

Re:Back the truck up...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

They are just trying to cash in on the who demonizing of off-shoring.

Re:Back the truck up...

[Anonymous Coward]

The writer was apparently someone who knew the rifting apart of west India and Madagascar started 85-88 mya, and the famous dinosaur die-off was only 65 mya.

Re:Back the truck up...

[fbform]

but as I recall, the 'Indian Ocean' wasn't there when the second one augered in.

From what I know, the Indian subcontinent started off somewhere near where Madagascar is today, and moved north, until it finally collided with Asia and formed the Himalayas. The coast used to extend all the way up to present-day Nepal and western China. This has apparently been borne out by ammonite fossils found in the Himalayas. If that is the case, this asteroid could have fallen in that ocean before the Himalayas were formed.

The question now is whether the Indian subcontinent could move that far in just 65 million years. Geologists - please verify using the age of the Himalayas as a guide.

Wasn't there some speculation on lava plume in the region? Something about India having an abnormally short continental shelf along its west coast, which apparently can be accounted for if you assume that the subcontinent moved over a large lava plume on its northward journey, which set up enough stress that its western fringes broke away or disintegrated, leaving the rest with a shortened continental shelf.

Re:Back the truck up...

[shadowbearer]

Interesting, and I can't remember myself.

One of the animations on these sites might help. I'm looking thru them now.

As slow as plate tectonics changes are, it's not likely there was a lot of difference in continental positions between the two. IIRC the Indian ocean is somewhat younger than the KT boundary, but as I said, I'm not totally sure.

In any case, the images of Keller's crater location *do* have the classic look of an impact crater; inner and outer rings, etc. My real questions about her claim are about the Chicxulub dating (easy enough to confirm, is the iridium impact layer newer or older than Chicxulub), her dating of her new crater find (always problematic until more confirmation from cores).

Fascinating, nonetheless. Of course it's entirely possible that whichever one was first started the extinction, and the second impact was the coup de grace (especially given the error bar in dating geological formations that old - I *think* it's around a 100K years, but correct me if I'm wrong, please, I don't remember exactly)

Disclaimer: IAAAG (I Am A Amateur Geologist)
SB

Lone Asteroid?

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

Hmm...I suppose that would make Mars the grassy knoll, right?

Re:Lone Asteroid?

[idontgno]

I was going to do the "grassy knoll" joke, you insensitive clod!

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont be a fool. Religious fanatics dont believe in dinosaurs.. first of all, to them earth is only 10,000 years old, second, dinos arent mentioned in the bible.. its all a conspiracy by satan.. the bones we find are just mixes of elephants and alligator bones.

Already stressed

[Anonymous Coward]

When the K-T boundary impact finally came, it hit an already stressed community... almost anything could have wiped them out at that point

Re:Already stressed

[Anonymous Coward]

When the K-T boundary impact finally came, it hit an already stressed community... almost anything could have wiped them out at that point

That is a common belief, but it is based on very slim evidence. The fossil record is so incredibly sparse, with many species known by only a few bones, that trying to say how many dinosaurs were alive at a given time based on how many fossils you have found from that time period is problematic at best.

The most exhaustive fossil survey to date suggests that there was no decline in dinosaur populations prior to the K-T impact. See e.g. this story for a writeup. This research implies that the K-T impact was the sole (or nearly so) reason for the dinosaur extinction.

Note that I'm not necessarily saying that the study is correct. I'm merely pointing out that with the unbelievably small percentage of bones that end up getting fossilized, and the unbelievably small percentage of fossils that get dug up and identified, it's very difficult to make any firm conclusions regarding population levels. We may never know for sure.

All we do know for sure is that before the K-T boundary layer, there were dinosaurs. After the K-T boundary layer, there were not.

Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows the dinosaurs' extinction was caused by a Lone Asteroid, fired by Oswald from the Proxima Centauri book depository.

Prehistoric Conspiracy

[superpulpsicle]

I don't know what to believe in anymore.

There are plenty of evidence suggesting man and dinosaur living side to side with one another at one time. Fossils of human and dinosaur foot steps found next to each other are alot more common than giant asteroids found in the Indian ocean.

Just like geology shows the egypt spinx head and body show different types of weather pattern damages.

There is too much contradictions to buy into one theory.

Re:Prehistoric Conspiracy

[Sesticulus]

There is no evidence that man and dinosaur lived together except in cartoons.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.html

Indian Ocean...

[cOdEgUru]

Indian Ocean eh?

I presume these Indians had something to do with the massive extinction of US Tech jobs as well?

First the poor dinosaurs, and now poor US geeks.. ............

And yes, I am Indian, the real deal, the kind Columbus went searching for..thankfully never found.

Re:Indian Ocean...

[AndroidCat]

In ages to come, they'll dig up the bones of dot-coms and wonder what caused them all to die off at the same time.

Re:Indian Ocean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said... LOL!

If Columbus had indeed found the REAL India, those guys would probably be flippin' burgers now!

(just like what we will be doing in a few years!)

Why, Why did Columbus find us, instead of the REAL India?!!!

Re:Indian Ocean...

[Anonymous Coward]

How could he have been looking for India if it hadn't already been "found"? He was looking for a shorter route to the East than sailing around the tip of Africa.

Re:Indian Ocean...

[Chris Burke]

Why, Why did Columbus find us, instead of the REAL India?!!!

Um... Since his plan was "sail west from Spain until we reach India", the odds were pretty strongly against him finding India before he found the Americas. At least according to my globe.

Not right

[Reorax]

The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean.

I always though the Second Impact was caused by one of the Angels...

No wonder I was so confused by the end.

Re:Not right

[dangil]

I was reading the comments just to find a evangelion related comment... now that I found I can return to my coffin and sleep forever again...

Re:Keller's Conclusions [weakly] Refuted

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Kellers findings are pretty well founded. The idea is that the Chicxulub impact occurred during this warming period with severe environmental effects but the extinction of the dinosaurs - When the second impact finally occurred, it hit an already stressed community which was the straw that broke the camel's back. Almost anything could have wiped them out at that point. Jan Smits doesn't refute this very clearly - but I would accept that the theory is less sensational that it appears from the headline.

Yet another theory?

[MissMarvel]

Ah.... The great K-T extinction debate continues....

For those interested in reading about the supporting data and possible causes of the K-T extinction,
here's a good discussion" by Dewey M. McLean of the Department of Geological Sciences,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Re:Yet another theory?

[cluckshot]

First my compliments to the author of the previous post. Obviously a person interested in a learned discussion. Secondly I would like to throw in a few more observations.

At Mile 282 on US I-65 in Alabama the KT Boundary is exposed in a Road Cut about 1/2 way up the cut. It is exposed frequently across Alabama. The following facts are observable by anyone looking at these sites.

[1] The site has contigious deposition of strata from well below to well above the KT Boundary

[2] The site has a crumbly rock/clay consistancy for some 20 feet below the KT Boundary

[3] The Rock is Sandstone for about 20 feet above and then is Limestone for about 60 feet.

[4] Above that mapping contigious strata are layers of coal, shale, and again limestone

All of these layers represent a contiguious geologic layering as they are essentially like pages in a book and of fairly consistent thickness over great distances. The presence of Limestone which has sea bed fossils brings into question exactly what we are seeing at the site. The reasons for this are multiple including the geologic age of the Limestone (Very Old) and the means of deposition of it (Sea Bed activity). I believe it would be quite fair to question very nearly any theory regards the KT Boundary. It is clear that the area was under the Ocean for a substantial period after the KT Boundary and it would appear that the KT deposition was fairly consistent with that event and possibly just one of many depositions layered this way. The fossil and other data from the KT Boundary area is inconsistent with any existing theory. The Limestone for example dates from early life times per Geologic Estimates about 600 Million Years. Yet it is above the KT Boundary.

These inconsistencies with existing theories need investigation as the area is one with a very substantial amount of data and has a very stable history geologically allowing the story to be read in order of events.

It can be safely said that the presence of the rocks above the KT Boundary are consistent with the continent being sunk below the ocean. Many rocks below this level hold the same data. The strata being so stable in deposition process showing large fairly even deposition layers calls into question exactly what happened to deposit the soft material and the KT Boundary. The sandstones above are similar to volcanic ash depositions.

Re:Yet another theory?

[geomon]

Pick up a primer on geology. Read the section on structural folds, faults, and plate tectonics. That will clear up some of your confusion.

Just for the record, I was standing on rock from the K/T boundary in Southern California, looking up 10 meters in the air at rock from the Precambrian. The section I was standing on was originally 10,000 meters of Grand Canyon sequence, attenuated 1000X, folded upside down, sheared off, and moved along northwest a lateral fault for 3.5 km.

Re: Yet another theory?

[Black Parrot]

Just for the record, I was standing on rock from the K/T boundary in Southern California, looking up 10 meters in the air at rock from the Precambrian. The section I was standing on was originally 10,000 meters of Grand Canyon sequence, attenuated 1000X, folded upside down, sheared off, and moved along northwest a lateral fault for 3.5 km.

Were you able to keep your balance through all of that?

Re: Yet another theory?

[geomon]

Keeping my balance was easy. The whole proces took about 5 million years. ;)

Re:Yet another theory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm .... the KT theory was convenient but I don't think it expains the whole story.

From memory the late Cretaceous was a high stress time for all life .... even without an impact (or multiple impacts). We are talking planet wide extremely high levels of vulcanism, massive deforestation over a period fo hundreds of thousands of years prior to the KT event, a corresponding reduction in the previous high levels of O2 (which would have been more damaging to larger than smaller lifeforms - especially ones which relied on high O2 for maximum efficiency like the dinosaurs), a massive reduction in (count and number of) species just prior to the event, and the like.

Factor in one of two asteroid/meteor impacts and that may have been the final straw which pushed the extinction barrow over the cliff.

To tell the truth I find the great Permian extinction much more intriguing than the late Cretaceous events ... as hundreds of Phyla of life disappeared forever in that event (and only three or four dropped off the scene during the late Cretaceous event)

Regards,

I knew it.

[hookedup]

See? The dinosaurs fell victim to outsourcing to india.

Re:I knew it.

[ArsonSmith]

The big American astroid was spactacular lage and confortable but unable to do the job. The Indian astroid was smaller faster and cheaper. What busness man in his right mind woldn't outsource to India?

Re:I knew it.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Or more accurately: Offshoring.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[maxwell demon]

Hmmm ... Kangaroos weren't mentioned in the bible as well. Nor was Australia. Probably the evil non-believers invented australia to hide the fact that earth really is flat :-)

Why not a viral extinction?

[BCGlorfindel]

The obviousness of this question makes me suspect it is a dumb one to ask but maybe someone can clarify for me. Why is it so strongly believed that some kind of environmental change wiped out dinos and not some kind of disease/virus?

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because while viruses can and do affect huge populaces, they rarely wipe out entire species so thoroughly. A virus that is too strong and leaves no one standing doesn't spread very far.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[millahtime]

"Why is it so strongly believed that some kind of environmental change wiped out dinos and not some kind of disease/virus?"

Lets be honest here for a moment. Because some group of scientists with a huge ego said so.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[stratjakt]

There are many theories..

The ones presented on a Discovery Channel special (it was about Mammoths, but close enough for government work) were;

"The big Chill" - the Ice Age froze 'em all. Popular among scientists.

"The big Kill" - hunted to death by humans, little evidence exists for this, popular with the tree hugging set.

and

"The big Ill" - wiped out by some sort of disease. There was some sort of microbal evidence from frozen remains presented for this one.

I remember hearing a disease theory about the dinosaurs, basically it had to do with the rise of mammals, prehistoric rats as a vector to spread the virus - modeled after the spread of Black plague.

Frankly, I don't care. I'm just glad they're extinct. I've seen Jurassic Park.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Xzzy]

> and not some kind of disease/virus?

Because there's always going to be a few who end up being immune and don't get infected.

Look at mosquitos for a good modern example.. bug spray manufacturer's have to update their formulas every few years because the bugs that survive end up being immune, and as they breed the entire population inherits the immunity.

Not that I'm an authority on the topic; I suppose a "super virus" could have nailed them and decimated the population so badly that even those who survived were unable to repopulate. So it's not to say a virus wasn't the cause, but it's not a convenient "deus ex" type solution.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[KnightStalker]

There were many groups of animals and plants that vanish or change radically at the K/T boundary, not just dinosaurs. It's possible that a virus would kill off one species. The likelihood decreases, I suspect, as you add more and more loosely related groups. It seems more likely that environmental change killed all of dinos, nautiloids, lots of mammals and birds (even though most survived, some did not), plankton, etc., than that a plague did it.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is known that there were many other plant and animal species, some of which live in the ocean, that disappeared at the same time.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[HD Webdev]

The obviousness of this question makes me suspect it is a dumb one to ask but maybe someone can clarify for me. Why is it so strongly believed that some kind of environmental change wiped out dinos and not some kind of disease/virus?

Not likely.

The disease would have to act slowly enough to allow for it to be spread over the entire planet without killing the carriers too soon. And, there would be areas where dinosaurs would have been isolated (except by air) due to changes in earth formations such as valleys & large rivers temporarily trapping dinosaurs in specific areas. Those dinosaurs should not have been infected.

The disease could have been carried by flying dinosaurs, but the chances of them covering every location on earth before dying isn't likely.

Not to mention, the virus would run into resistant dinosaurs due to species differences.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[cens0r]

Not only would it have to wipe out all of a single species, this virus would half to jump from species to species. Almost all the life on the planet went extinct in a short period of time. So this virus would have to affect different species of animals and plants. I find the asteroid theory easier to swallow.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Muad'Dave]

You forgot:

• The big "Spill" - prehistoric tanker of this new substance tentatively named "oil" runs aground, killing everything.
• The big "Krill" - mutated giant sea creatures crawl from the sea, killing everything.
• The big "Dill" - giant pickle falls from the sky, killing everything.
• The big "Grill" - Eddie Murphy and his uncle Gus start a massive fire using "2 millions gallons of gasoline and half a continent of wood", killing everything.
• The big "Quill" - Giant porcupine goes on a rampage, killing everything.
• The big "Still" - Ancient life discovers the pleasures of ethyl alcohol, killing everything.
• The big "Thrill" - Michael Jackson ... [deleted], killing everything.
• The big "Drill" - While searching for the aforementioned "oil", Halliburton from Planet X accidently drills thru Earth, killing everything.
• The big "Frill" - Too much influence from "Queer Eye for the straight Guynosaur" causes birth rates to plummet, killing everything.
• The big "Phil" - A well-known talk-psychiatrist rolls over on a whole generation of dinosaur eggs while sunning himself, killing everything.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Anonymous Coward]

disease is something we worry about now, but the dinos didn't jetset all over the place like we do now.

even the black plague came on rats on human ships from the orient, didn't it?

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[zakezuke]

"The big Ill" - wiped out by some sort of disease. There was some sort of microbal evidence from frozen remains presented for this one.

Is it just me or when I see this do I think of the Beasty Boys being responcible for mass extinction?

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genius.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think Mr. T (or other mammals) ate their balls while they were sleeping, so they couldn't reproduce anymore and died out.

--Coder

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Skjellifetti]

"The big Chill" - the Ice Age froze 'em all. Popular among scientists.

I'm really skeptical that a mammoth extinction caused by an Ice Age is popular among scientists. Mammoths seem to have been well adapted for the cold and died off when the climate became warmer.

"The big Kill" - hunted to death by humans, little evidence exists for this, popular with the tree hugging set.

There is plenty of evidence for human involvement in extinctions of mammals such as the mammoth. The models demonstrate that it doesn't take a whole lot of hunting to drive a population of large mammals to extinction.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Cryp2Nite]

You forgot a big one

• The big "Bill" - One clever dino invents a new operating system for their prehistoric abacusses, their whole society becomes dependent on it, until some the outbreak of an 'abacus virus' that wipes out their computing infrastructure, total dino civilisation collapse ensues, killing everything.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Oligonicella]

While a lot of reasons have been given to your question, the simplest is this:
It wasn't *just* the dinosaurs. Reptiles, amphibians, plants, diatoms........
Lots of extinction, not just dinos.

Before you get huffy about only dinos went completely extinct, check out birds.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Pentagram]

I could just about buy the idea of some kind of super-virus that infected many dinosaur species using some communal hole in the lizard defence systems. One small piece of evidence that might support the theory is that crocs (and related species) which are some of the few surviving dinosaur-like creatures from the time have incredible immune systems. I still don't think it's at all likely though and of course you still have the problem of the other species that went extinct at the same time.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Pentagram]

The disease would have to act slowly enough to allow for it to be spread over the entire planet without killing the carriers too soon.

How about a virus that caused infertility? That could efficiently cause serious extinctions whilst still being spread for the full lifespan of the animals.

Not to mention, the virus would run into resistant dinosaurs due to species differences.

Not necessarily true. A new virus, with drastically different methods of attack to anything encountered previously could kill large numbers of species without encountering any that have evolved appropriate defence mechanisms (though interestingly crocodiles which did survive through the mass extinction have superb immune systems). It might not seem likely for such a super-virus (or other pathogen) to evolve but there have been many millennia of trial and error.

I don't think that it's very plausible, but it seems remotely possible.

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[R33MSpec]

That has got to be one of the funniest things i've read on here in a while! Excellent stuff!

Re:Why not a viral extinction?

[Anonymous Coward]

All a disease would have to do is disrupt the food chain sufficently enough.

And it doesn't have to be the dinosaurs directly either.

A good deal of research suggests the mass infiltration of bacteria into several diverse food niches is the ONLY thing hold back a massive viral infection today. Trash out one of those bacteria specific to that food nich and you've got problems.

The means of adaptation and viral resistance back then is anyone's guess. There isn't sufficent research. It's an open guess as to how it would have played out.

Look at how AIDS has evolved. If a virus which broke the rules of incubation similar to AIDS happened back then...

It is conjecture (at least there is evidence of an asteroid hit) but I wouldn't discount it entirely (viral infection could have been one of several other factors acting in concert).

Another suggestion

[TobiasSodergren]

... is that practically all dinosaurs that lived after the first impact were dead before the second hit earth ;)

Re:Another suggestion

[stonecypher]

Of course, that's exactly what the article said, so the moderator that marked this interesting should be shot.

Re:Another suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, you're right... I was trying to point out that a lot of dinosaurs die during the period because of old age, so I was vaguely aiming for "funny"..

Anyway, since nobody understood the joke, I guess the meta-moderators will put things back to normal.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Well actually, some of them believe the dinos got wiped out by the Great Flood. To think that all those jews before Noah had to go around dodging dinosaur feet..

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the dinosaur bones were put there to test our faith...

Second Impact?

[orpheus2000]

The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean.

I had always thought the Second Impact was in Antarctica when Adam got pissed and melted the entire continent.

Parent a Bit Redundant?

[Anonymous Coward]

You decide!

Re:Parent a Bit Redundant?

[AndroidCat]

First post at 11:56. "Redundant" post at 11:59.

Marsupial-ocalypse!

[Thud457]

The obvious explanation for that is that Koalas were created by Satan.

The second impact....

[alexborges]

..was engeneered by mankind to reduce the full impact and consecuence of the finding of Adam.

In order to create the Evas, humanity had to reduce Adam to an embrionic state. This was the second impact....

You insensitive CLOD!

Stress

[Citizen of Earth]

I know I'd be stressed if I lived to be 300,000 years old.

Re:Stress

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention stinky. You know after the first 100k years, you would just be too bored to take a shower.

Deccan Traps?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article doesn't seem to make any clear connection between the climatic stress - warming - supposedly caused by the eruptions that created the Deccan Traps and any meteorite. The accompanying graphs show a steady climatic cooling trend in the late Cretaceous and that curve doesn't appear to be affected by the iridium yeilding event. The biological diversity however correlates pretty muc exactly in geological time. So, where are the linking data that make sense of this article?

Hey, dinos !

[Anonymous Coward]

No luck this time. Same player shoot again.

We all know...

[ebunga]

That the climate change that killed off dinosaurs was caused by greenhouse gasses from American SUVs.

Re:We all know...

[Hassman]

The funny thing is that all the SUVs were made by non-American car companies...

Adam, right?

[BradySama]

Actually, I think it was Adam, when we attempted to shrink him down and put him in a briefcase - and it was Antarctica that bore the brunt of that one... (hehe) We're such dorks...

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Shall we come up with a comprehensive list of everything that wasn't mentioned in the Bible? Get real folks. Even the people who believe in the Bible as literal truth need to face the fact that it is finite in size. It was never meant to be the repository of all knowledge. Just consider the fact that it didn't contain detailed instructions for many of the skills that existed at the time it was written.

In the Immortal words of the mortal Bill Hicks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I think God put you here to test my faith.

My TV told me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that the dinosaurs dropped a bunch of bombs into the volcanos and they all erupted and the sky was filled with volcano ash and it got really cold and they all got buried under snow and caused an ice age and that's what killed them all.

They were oddly resistant to frying pans to the head though.

Re:My TV told me...

[stonecypher]

Makes you wonder if anyone besides you and I realize that that's not totally random, or would recognize "You killed my cabbage! Negotiations are off!"

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[back_pages]

And these who pervert the purpose of religion are also forced to admit that Asian people must have been created by Satan else acknowledge the duality of the Bible and reality. It's easy to dismiss penguins, kangaroos, and Australians as the work of the devil, but to realize that one's faulty religious beliefs actually demand full fledged racism against the majority of the world - fully contradicting the teachings of Jesus Christ - is sometimes exactly the brand of clue stick needed.

Remember, Jesus taught us to love all of God's children. Those pesky Asians couldn't possibly be God's children if the Old Testament is an accurate account of history. Noah's flood must have wiped out all of those destable foreigners, except that the Chinese had a society at the time with written history that has no details of an unusual flood.

Even more eye-opening is the fact that literal interpretations of the Bible are extremely new. Such intellectual hobbling wasn't popular until the 19th or 20th century - for almost 2000 years Christians realized what the purpose of the Bible was, only recently did some of them shut off their God given faculties and prescribe to a system of belief founded on utter and incredible ignorance.

2nd Impact

[The12thRonin]

I call BS on this article. Everyone knows that the 2nd impact happens in Antartica in a couple years. Then a whiny little bitch ends up in a giant robot who was once his mother.

The 3rd impact is up for debate if it happens or not.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[back_pages]

I was only kidding about the Australians - forgot to add that as a PS on the last post. Kangaroos definitely do the bidding of the Prince of Darkness, though.

or Kevin Costner.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we seriously have to believe that this one asteroid entered the neck of Tyrannosaurus Rex, pierced the left lung of Triceratops and then PAUSED IN MIDAIR to hit a pterodactyl in the eye? I say NO gentlemen. There had to be a second asteroid posted on the grassy knoll.

The Flat Earth Society

[Greyfox]

www.flat-earth.org

In your heart you know it's flat (This appeals to the Discordian in me.)

Re:The Flat Earth Society

[jbrader]

I think it's incredibly ironic somewhere right now there is probably someone using a satellite link to look at the Flat Earth Society web site.

Re:The Flat Earth Society

[Cro Magnon]

That's a lie! There ARE no satellites up there. Now let me finish talking on my cell phone and get back to my DirecTivo.

Re:The Flat Earth Society

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone please tell me its a JOKE ! I dont know why anyone whould create such a trollish page. Obviously the author of the page does not beleive in the theory as you can see from his 'FAQ'.

Re:The Flat Earth Society

[MacDork]

The real joke is that 500 years from now, someone will look back in an archive, find this website or a print of it and decide it is representative of the views of the people of our time. Just like we have done. If the people of the middle ages or renaissance believed the earth was flat, then please explain Atlas holding the globe on his shoulders.

Mass extinction

[droleary]

The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean.

And you thought it was just tech jobs that got outsourced to India!

Conspiracy theory

[Anonymous Coward]

There must have been a second asteroid.

After all, everyone knows that the JFK 'Second Gunman' Theory is 100% accurate.;-)

Re:Conspiracy theory

[BorgCopyeditor]

Now repeat after me: "One asteroid ... acting alone ..." (etc.)

There! Now don't you feel better?

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[gl4ss]

the 'beauty' of religious 'facts' is that everything that is against them is just a test of faith, so even if you have proof against them it doesn't count. some crackpot theorists have been using the same argument as well. or internal 500 server error

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[ogre57]

.. the Chinese had a society at the time with written history that has no details of an unusual flood.

Been decades, wasn't the worldwide commonality of stories of an unusual flood one of Velikovsky's data points?

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[CdnZero]

Ah, good old mindless Christian(ity) bashing...made especially amusing since other scientists are already disputing this theory. (Check a few posts up ;) To be blunt, many theories that have come out of scientific circles are at least as stupid as the theories that you are "presenting". Quit whining, Christians don't have a lock on being morons.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I think some of you need to do a better job of keeping up with what the religious fanatics believe. Do you really think your arguments trying to make pinprick holes in their belief system haven't been answered countless times before?

There is an answer to multiple races.
There is an answer for the dinosaur extinction.
They do believe dinosours existed.

Please don't make yourselves look like fools talking about stuff you don't know anything about. Keep your reputation high by talking about geek stuff which you know best, not religion. Your arrogance is amusing.

What are the odds?

[Kjella]

Of two meteors, one near-extinction level, the second not-quite-but-enough-to-finish-them-off level, within 300,000 years?

Personally I say slim and none. 300,000 years is a fucking long time. Remember where humanity was 300,000 years ago (hint: not exactly homo sapiens sapiens). Whatever near-cataclysmic damage the first meteor did, nature would have moved on. If the first meteor didn't wipe them all out, the ones that did survive would also have been those with the best odds against the second meteor. So, it doesn't really make sense.

Kjella

Re:What are the odds?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, it was 75,000 years ago, and only ~10,000 humans survived it. This is why there is so little genetic diversity among humans.

Re:What are the odds?

[Guido von Guido]

This isn't such a stretch if they had been in similar orbits. For instance, they might have been part of the same asteroid at one time, which had been split up by some other collision at some point in time. There may have been other, smaller fragments of the same original asteroid which hit the earth or moon. Second, the assumption that the ones who survived the first one would have the best odds against the second just isn't true. If dinosaur populations never really rebounded after the first episode, they'd clearly be at risk for the second.

Re:What are the odds?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about? Who modded this up?

Re:What are the odds?

[Kupek]

I think he's referring to a huge volcanic eruption some ~100,000 years ago that killed off many, many organisms and made the Earth generally inhospitable for about 10,000 years. However, no extincitons are associated with the event.

I don't have any books on hand, but I think it was a volcanic eruption - the one that is now currently Yellowstone, I think. (Yes, Yellowstone is a super volcano - the largest in the world in fact.) Most of this is from what I can remember of Bill Bryson's "A Brief History of Nearly Everything."

Re:What are the odds?

[RedWizzard]

I don't have any books on hand, but I think it was a volcanic eruption - the one that is now currently Yellowstone, I think. (Yes, Yellowstone is a super volcano - the largest in the world in fact.)

Yellowstone last erupted about 600,000 years ago. The eruption 75,000 years ago was Toba, Indonesia. It is believed that the human world population may have been reduced to as few as 2000 in the aftermath of that event.

Yellowstone and Toba's eruptions have been devastating, but they are not the most destructive. Flood basalt erruptions have that distinction:

• Columbia River Flood Basalts cover about 165,000 km^3
• Deccan Traps, India covers around 500,000 km^3. This occurred about 65 million years ago and is a more convincing second event to have finished off the dinosaurs than a second meteor strike.
• The Siberian Traps cover 2.5 million km^3 and formed about 250 million years ago, corresponding with the Permian-Triassic Boundary, and the largest mass extinction we know about. There is a theory that there may have been a meteor strike around the same time. If true it's an interesting coincidence.

In contrast Yellowstone and Toba ejected about 3000 km^3 of material.

Re:What are the odds?

[Kupek]

Interesthing, thanks for the info.

Re:What are the odds?

[Kupek]

300,000 years is a fucking long time.

For a species, yes. For a planet, no.

My vote is...

[PhatKat]

There seems to be a popular opinion that humans are the most evolved of all species... that statement is totally bogus for a number of reasons, but if you define most evolved as best adapted to surviving whatever its environment throws at it (the galactic environment you could say), you just can't beat single celled organisms. The more adapted you are, the more you depend upon the situations and circumstances that make those adaptations beneficial. If we have a true Armageddon, I'm voting for the bacteria that live in deep sea volcanoes... it doesn't even need the Sun's light to survive.

Re:My vote is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in deep sea volcanos, with a single cell, without Paris Hilton? Fuck that... that's not life!

Re:My vote is...

[jjohnson]

Isn't one of the traditional measures of how "evolved" any organism is, is a balance of well-adaptedness and biological complexity?

I realize that any argument about humans being more or less evolved than other species gets into a lot of collective racial ego, but typically more complex organisms are viewed as more evolved because they not only survive but make better use of their environment for higher purposes. Your single celled, deep water, hot volcanic dwelling organism is tough to kill (though raising it to the surface would probably explode it), but it's not particularly adapted, nor does it do anything but sit there and metabolize sulfur.

Re:My vote is...

[Jerf]

Humanity is right now the only feasible chance that "Mother Nature" has of spreading the macroscopic portions of the environment to other planets and environments.

Also, you're being a little unfair: "Single celled organisms" probably are more flexible then humanity right now... but so are "reptiles". Pick me one species of single-celled organism that does as well as we do... and don't forget that at the moment we're surviving in space, even if it's not self-sustaining quite yet. The organisms that live in deep sea volcanos can't live in a mountain lake, after all.

(This is in the spirit of intellectual play; none of this particularly matters ;-) )

Re:My vote is...

[PakProtector]

If we have a true Armageddon, I'm voting for the bacteria that live in deep sea volcanoes... it doesn't even need the Sun's light to survive.

Neither does any self respecting Nerd! Just give me my DSL and the Pringles!

Re:My vote is...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had enough of that B.S. already. I just finished reading Imaginary Magnitude. You sound like you copied your comment right from it.

Re:My vote is...

[praedor]

I have two words for you: Deinococcus radiodurans.

OK, I have another: cockroaches.

Plenty more where that came from. Each of them more evolutionarily/biologically robust than humans.

We've been around for a fraction of the time that either of these organisms (and most others). Me thinks it is still too early to be sticking some Super Crown on our heads. When we are actively spreading around the galaxy (just to Mars doesn't really count), particularly when we have people "out there" who can cut the chord with both Sol and Earth entirely...then you have an argument in our favor. Until then, we are just extinction fodder, likely at our own hands. Cockroaches, ants, termites, bacteria, fungi, etc, will be dancing on our fossils.

Re:My vote is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If we have a true Armageddon, I'm voting for the bacteria that live in deep sea volcanoes... it doesn't even need the Sun's light to survive."

great. that means after the next global killer the world will be rules by goths. I for one welcome our new non conformist overloards.

"i'm not gonna live in a 3rd world country with all the conformists" - southpark

Two less than one?

[InfiniteWisdom]

So two asteroids is less of a violent end than one?

First cut is the deepest...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thed First cut is the deepest theory needs to be revisited too... Probably the second one is even deeper.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing about "proof" is that it's a pretty elusive thing, eh?

One man's proof is another man's pudding, is what I like to say.

Show me someone who can prove the earth is round and I'll show you one who can prove the earth is flat.

Show me someone who can prove that black holes destroy data and I'll show you someone who can prove that data still exists in a black hole.

Show me someone who can prove dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid and I'll show you someone who can prove they died in a big bath.

Oh wait, you say none of these can be proved? Oh, sorry.

What?

[travdaddy]

What? I thought it was cigarettes!

You know you need new glasses when...

[nizo]

Chicxulub

Am I the only one that saw this and thought for a second that the dinosaurs might have been wiped out by an asteroid named Chixclub?

Re:You know you need new glasses when...

[damiena]

I read is as being killed off by Cthulhu and it all made perfect sense.

One moment please....

[imsabbel]

We all know that the second impact was in antarctica, while trying to revive ADAM.....

He deals with that

[Von Rex]

Check out his reply to the original article.

There's a picture of the soil sample he's talking about, too.

"The best evidence in favour of a single impact, I repeat, is in the K/T record from the US western interior. In numerous outcrops from Alberta in Canada, through Dogie Creek in Wyoming to the Raton Basin in New Mexico an iridium-enriched clay layer occurs in coal swamp deposits at the palynological K/T boundary. This clay layer has a dual nature (Izett, 1990), and consist of two layers: a lower layer that contains spherules (best seen in Dogie creek (Fig. 7) morphologicaly indistinguishable from the Chicxulub spherules from the Gulf.

The upper layer is strongly enriched in iridium and shocked minerals, such as quartz, feldspar and zircons. The shocked zircons are shown (Krogh, 1993) to have the isotopic properties (Sm/Nd) of the pan-African basement of the Chicxulub crater. In all the mentioned localities the two layers are in contact with each other, without an intervening layer. Not even a single layer of one fall season of leaves or plant material occurs between the two layers. If the upper, iridium-rich, layer is from another impact than the Chicxulub impact, they have to be simultaneous, and have to occur on the same pan-African basement - in itself highly unlikely, but not impossible. A 300Ka separation between the two layers in all the localities, as Keller posits for the separation between the Chicxulub impact and the iridium producing impact, is therefore excluded - barring a miracle."

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

[imadork]

Taco, didn't you learn from chrisd's mistake?

You shouldn't talk about the death of the "lone asteroid" theory until the people on the West Coast have had a chance to hear about it, you insensitive clod!

I gotta question...

[Anonymous Coward]

"
I call BS on this article. Everyone knows that the 2nd impact happens in Antartica in a couple years. Then a whiny little bitch ends up in a giant robot who was once his mother.

The 3rd impact is up for debate if it happens or not.
"

So my question is this: What is this dude talking about? I've seen a couple of comments about Adam and Eve and Antarctica and stuff... But I guess I didn't get the origianl memo. Will someone please explain or link to WTF is going on?

This seems to be a popular joke. Is this like the time I had to ask why the number sixty-nine was funny?

Re:I gotta question...

[The12thRonin]

Guide to Neon Genesis Evangelion

One of the better anime series up until the last two episodes and two movies.

That really makes sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if you can't explain everything with the theory of ONE asteroid, TWO may be the solution!

Add asteroids until it works!

What happened to the nickel theory?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that this second meteorite was rich in poisonous metals, tainting the soil world-wide for years to come? This article is interesting, but I have not seen mention of the theory elsewhere.

Re:What happened to the nickel theory?

[whig]

Nickels are more likely to land heads down, right?

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[werfele]

I'd be the last to propound a literal interpretation of the Bible, but I believe the traditional interpretation of Genesis is that all of humanity is descended from Noah's children. Asians are presumed to be the descendants of Shem. You'll have to look for the origins of racism elsewhere.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh... Since when are you an expert on religious fanatics or the Bible? All fanatics I know do believe in dinosaurs and there are some mentioned in the book of Job. Generally they have a reasonable explanation for their views and can piece together scientific discoveries and their view of religion.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[dave420]

Jesus meant to go to Australia, but, err... he was watching Divorce Court on TV, and kind of forgot. or something.

NASA's finding,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

The anticipated important announcement today at 2 pm by NASA will reveal that Marchians struck the Earth to end the ever increasing noise that Dinos produced on Earth. Secondary consideration was, that killing the Dinos would help to emerge the human race. Martians believed that Dinos - due to their large size - have very little chance to "manned" space exploration, which is the prrof of any sophisticated life form in the Universe.
As Darwin pointed out later, in the quest for space exploration, the ultimate evolution, the Dinos had no choice. The more developed Martians, obviously were well aware of this theory long before, so they decided to play G_d, by bouncing some rocks to Earth.
God bless them them for their wisdom.
Now we, the human race finally have a chance to pay back the favour and resurrect the Martians, who have gone extinct themselves - NASA will reveal us today at 2 pm, why.

Wow, now THAT is stress

[gosand]

When the K-T boundary impact finally came, it hit an already stressed community... almost anything could have wiped them out at that point

And I thought I was stressed working 10 hour days. I can't even imagine how stressed I would be after 300,000 years.

That theory is still controversial

[Von Rex]

The abiotic theory on the origin of oil, while politically convenient to certain groups due to it's consequence of almost unlimited oil reserves, is still highly controversial. It is not reasonable to expect it to be taught as fact in textbooks for a long time, if ever.

Re:That theory is still controversial

[JeffWhitledge]

What about the theory that the earth was once a wet planet? And the corresponding theory that if it was wet it might have once supported life?

spooky action at a distance

[Doc Ruby]

If only we could tell at what time of day, and in which season, these two asteroid impacts occurred, we might be able to tell whether they came from the same direction. And if we knew their velocities, we could tell whether they might have come from the same originating event. Then we could trace the path back to the place which fired these missiles at us, and smoke 'em out.

Re:spooky action at a distance

[The12thRonin]

So are you ready to send in the Mobile Infantry?

Re:spooky action at a distance

[Doc Ruby]

Well, a laser would be faster, but are you volunteering? You'd be the farthest ronin from any master, ever.

Dutch radio interview

[Trestran]

For the Dutch slashdotters; Jan Smit said something about it on the Dutch radio(it's about 10 minutes into the stream), where he basicly called everything said by Kellar bullocks("a lott of mud throwing" and "facts that are verifiably wrong").

He has one of the samples of this study was based on (and (acording to above mentioned radioshow) the who divided up the original). In the end of the radiointerview he sugests letting all the original drill samples be tested by a third party for magnesium or calcium to prove if what Kellar has found are actual organism or just cristaline structures (as Smit seem to think). Sounds good to me, but then IANAPaleontologist.

Re:Keller's Conclusions [weakly] Refuted

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking on a scale of millions of years. I really would leave a puny 300,000 year figure up to error.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Cynikal]

actually when i was 13 i told my family that i no longer wanted to go to church with them and that i had serious dissagreements with the teachings of the bible. (im not athiest, i just believe the word of the bible translated and written by man, and thus currupted the meaning, but i wont get into that here)

so they got some church people came over to try to change my mind. The first thing i asked them was if God made the world in 7 days and then right after created adam and eve, how do they explain dinosaurs? to which they answered in the language the bible was written a "day" was simply a 'period of time' that could have ranged up to a few million years even.. so i asked if god created the earth in 7 periods of time, technically it could have been created in 700,000,000 years or something, why do they consider that such a huge feat? they really didnt have any noteworthy answers for me, and in the end they gave up and i was thankfully never obliged to attend church anymore-- in fact it was vaguely insinuated that i wasnt really welcome there anymore.. which only proved another of my suspiscions that they didnt really like free thinkers there (no im not saying all churches, but this one in particular)

So the asteroid was outsourced then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing we can blame on the Indians.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

oddly, a dino or dragon like creature is mentioned in the bible. can't find it right now, but i remember it could breath fire and the footnote said it was "probably a croc or aligator"...

What are the odds?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the odds of two large asteroids (or meteors or whatever they're called) strinking the Earth within a period of 300,000 years? It seems kind of like finding a dead man who has burn marks on his head after a storm and concluding that he was struck by lightning twice because he didn't die immediately after the first strike.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[lambent]

Innocent until proven guilty, my friend. If you want to refute them, post evidence. Otherwise, you're doing the same thing that they are.

I also vehemently profess, that Jesus was a woman, smoked pot, and lived to bear 18 children, the bloodlines of which are present in all of our governments' heads.

People believe that, too. I swear, it's true. Don't belive me? Look it up yourself.

It's the oldest trick in the book ... (including the Bible). Say something, offer no proof.

"End of the"?

[DynaSoar]

Oh, hell no. This is a perennial windmill to be tilted at. There's an alternate hypothesis presented every year or so, and not because the most widely accepted hypothesis doesn't do a good job of explaining the data. It's one of those unanswerables that you can make your professional mark on by going up against it. As in boxing, you don't have to win against the champ, you just have to last enough rounds.

Never Underestimate the Power of the Farce

[ackthpt]

It may just be scientist ruffling their feathers at a new theory, or there may very well be serious problems with the evidence. It's certainly not a final answer yet.

A few theories to give a severe wedgie and laugh at are what others use to make their own look more reasonable. Be wary of all theories equally.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

found it."leviathan" and "behemoth"
google: bible dragon
comes up with a bit of stuff.

http://www.dragon-history.com/
http://www.icr.o rg/pubs/imp/imp-241.htm

Dino skeletons on Mars?

[HermanZA]

I'm waiting for the mars probes to find dino skeletons on Mars. Just finding salty muck really isn't all that cool at all, unless the salty muck sticking to the rover wheels is dyno poop - now that would be something...

Cause and Effect?

[boojum.cat]

What has bothered me for a long time about the Chicxulub theory is that nobody ever provides evidence linking the impact to the extinction. Every time new evidence appears indicating that there was an impact, it's reported as being new evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out by it. Actually, all it shows is that there was an impact of some sort.

Years ago I read Robert Bakker's book, 'The Dinosaur Heresies". In it he claims that the fossil evidence shows that the dinosaurs were in decline long before the KT boundary and the appearance of its famed iridium layer. Furthermore, many species survived the extinction, and some of those species (such as amphibians) were ones that you might expect to be particularly susceptible. So although the impact might have contributed to the mass extinction, it's not likely to have been the root cause.

Re:Cause and Effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only so much evidence you can get from fossil records and it's not very "fine grained". That being said the general theory is that there is a marked decline immediately after the KT event and that is what ultimately led to the demise of many of the dinosaur species.

They may have been in decline before that but to some degree it's immaterial - the KT event is what finished them off and opened up many ecological niches that mammals eventually filled.

You see

[umrgregg]

In America, even extinction is outsourced to India.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Crispy Critters]

"It's easy to dismiss penguins...as the work of the devil"

For the last time, Linux is not a derived work of BSD or any other "Unix". You SCOG astroturfers make me ill.

A new theory? Probably not the last

[geomon]

When I was an undergrad geology student 20 years ago, the prevailing theory of how dinosaurs went extinct involved an asteroid hitting the Earth on the Atlantic Ridge system. The target location would be the present-day island of Iceland. The evidence used to support the conclusion included iridium-soaked sediments ringing Iceland dated right at the Mesozoic/Cenozoic (K/T) break, the high concentration of ultramafics at the surface, etc. etc.

The problem for this theory was (is!) the chain of events that would have led to a mass extinction. The theory assumed that the explosive force of the impact would have kicked up large amounts of dust and moisture, which would reduced solar activity and stunted or halted sufficient production of vegetative matter. That would have led to the die-off of herbivores, which in turn would have led to carnivore die-off. The hitch? Insufficient evidence of mass flora extinction at the K/T boundary.

Some years later, the location of the impact changed to Mexico, but the mechanics stayed the same. But there is still a huge lack of vegetative data to support a mass extinction.

So now there are several asteroids hitting the Earth. Did that change the fundamental assumptions?

Nope.

I'm glad the debate is still alive. Nothing bothers me more than a theory that attempts to tie everything together in a neat package.

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[Anonymous Coward]

There is ample evidence for substantial floral changes across the K/T boundary. 20 years ago, that was only starting to be documented, but since then, many sections across the boundary in Alberta and the SW USA show the extinction of several groups of plants. Most notably, there is a "fern spike", where fern spores become unusually abundant for a while after the event. This is thought to be analogous to the effect seen after a forest fire, where many of the first plants to sprout up are ferns. Why forest fires over a wide area? It would be consistent with the large amount of suborbital red-hot impact melt that would rain down globally in the aftermath of a large impact.

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[geomon]

The reply posted before yours points to the same evidence: large forest fires and groups of plants going extinct due to suborbital impact melt.

What is missing here is the mechanism that led to the extinction of LARGE amounts of fauna. Not just one or two groups, but an entire sequence of geologic strata heavily poplulated by fossils. MASSIVE extinction of fauna across the entire planet, but only a few species of plants in two remote regions of the Earth.

Again, where is the large flora extinction?

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[shadowbearer]

The mechanism that's been postulated is large amounts of dust in the atmosphere cutting off sunlight to photosynthesis. Yeah, it's debatable, but it makes a lot of sense, given the size of Chicxulub.

There is a huge amount of evidence, as the grandparent post said, for floral exctinction above the KT boundary. It's likely there were many mechanisms in additon to the two discussed. There is also very ample evidence of fauna extinction, and consider that most of the fauna at the time fed on the flora.

It's good that you're being skeptical about it, but I think you should read more of the papers published in the last quarter century about Louis's theories. Think x10K Krakatoa event.

SB

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[geomon]

I not only read the literature, I publish.

The fact is, there is no *large* (meaning, global) extinction of flora. There is no large global Tertiary deposit of the kind that would produce a complete extinction of the dinosaurs.

Problems, problems.....

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[shadowbearer]

Hmm. What I've read and researched disagrees with that; there are, in fact, a lot of published studies, hundreds, actually, that disagree with that opinion about the floral and faunal extinctions at the K/T-/iridium boundary. Do you perhaps have some links, or would you be willing to expound on that a bit? I'd create a journal entry specifically for it, if I find your arguments convincing.

So far I've just seen statements (like "no large global Tertiary (?) deposit of the kind that would produce..." without any backup. That statement lacks explanation of why you believe there *is* no mechanism.

I may be only an amateur geologist, but I've been one for nearly a quarter century now. I realize all too well just how subject to debate most of these theories are, so I'd like to hear what you have to say. Just back it up with something more convincing than the generalizations you've produced so far.

SB

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[geomon]

I've seen no evidence of large *flora* extinctions. The evidence for large faunal extinction is preserved in the geologic record. The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.

I *never* said that there were no faunal extinctions near the K/T boundary. I said there is no evidence for a global *flora* extinction.

As for producing evidence, those who make positive assertions of fact are expected to provide the evidence. I said that I have seen no evidence of a large global Tertiary flora deposit. That does not mean that there have not been regional die-off due to changes in climate.

To me, the assumptions that underlie the theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs requires consistancy. The chain of events that starts with a meteor impact that leads, in turn, to solar intensity problems, that creates food shortages leading to herbavore extinction followed closely by carnivore extinction..... had *better* provide more convincing evidence of *global* flora extinction.

If you are asking me to support my contention that there is *no* convincing evidence of global flora extinctions, consider the possibility that you are asking me to prove a negative.

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[shadowbearer]

I've seen no evidence of large *flora* extinctions.

Research fossil pollen levels.

The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.

So...if you have an explanation for large floral extinctions during the Cretaceous, that wouldn't involve large fauna extinctions (most of the dinosaur genra were veg eaters, with the corresponding food chain) then you should share it with the scientific community, not slashdot. Odd...I have read very little that gives me any indication that a 60% extinction of the food source for a fauna which evolved for 50 million+ years along that particular food chain could survive having their food chain amputated. But hey, you're entitled to your beliefs. Actually, the very fact that you're posting this to slashdot, without links, without serious background, makes me suspect that you're trolling. But, hey, I'll bite. For tonite. After tonite, you'll have to grab my attention.

As for producing evidence, those who make positive assertions of fact are expected to provide the evidence.

Which is why I asked you to provide some. Obviously you're not willing to.

To me, the assumptions that underlie the theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs requires consistancy. The chain of events that starts with a meteor impact that leads, in turn, to solar intensity problems, that creates food shortages leading to herbavore extinction followed closely by carnivore extinction..... had *better* provide more convincing evidence of *global* flora extinction.

If you are asking me to support my contention that there is *no* convincing evidence of global flora extinctions, consider the possibility that you are asking me to prove a negative.

Environmental changes on a global scale that lead to species extinction are pretty well documented. I think you should do some more reading.

Prove a negative? Those who make positive assertions of fact are expected to provide the evidence.

What part of disproving theory don't you understand? Other than giving evidence, that is. For evidence, look at the many other posts in this article. You are chasing a strawman, and you won't catch him.

I have no more time for this. If you want to continue it, do so in my journal - just post a comment anywhere there, and... if you can present a good argument, then I'll open a dialogue. Otherwise this is totally OT and has no business here.

SB

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[geomon]

>>The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.

"So...if you have an explanation for large floral extinctions during the Cretaceous, that wouldn't involve large fauna extinctions..."

For the faunal extinction, I have physical evidence: fossils. Pollen levels are no substitute for copious amounts of plant fossils (i.e., leaf impressions, large lignite seams associated with short, quick deposition of plant matter).

On the issue of faunal extinction immediately following a floral extinction, that is my point. You have said that one necessarily leads to the other. Where is your evidence?

I have fossils of dinosaurs. You have:

1) Meteor
2)?????
3) Profit!!!

Oh, you also have your stomping of feet regarding my not providing links. I have run several queries of GeoREF for your evidence of large, global floral extictions and have found none.

Would you like me to make some up?

As for your accusations of trolling and the inappropriate nature of my replies, me thinks thou protesteth to mightily.

Re:A new theory? Probably not the last

[shadowbearer]

For the faunal extinction, I have physical evidence: fossils. Pollen levels are no substitute for copious amounts of plant fossils (i.e., leaf impressions, large lignite seams associated with short, quick deposition of plant matter).

I don't understand why you think that there would be large lignite seams. If the deposition happened fast enough, at the most there might be a few traces left in some places. It's not like there would be long term plant deposits. In any case, there is some indications of short term ones.

On the issue of faunal extinction immediately following a floral extinction, that is my point. You have said that one necessarily leads to the other. Where is your evidence?

Given that most dinosaurs either relied upon flora for their survival, or relied upon eating other dinosaurs which relied upon flora (and this is fairly well established, I think), what exactly are you asking for?
I don't need to know that if, for example, the world suffered enormous, nationwide crop failures, that people would starve. The food chain is pretty well established.
Guess I'm not sure what you're asking for, here. Proof that destruction of a food source on a massive scale tends to eliminate those species who rely on that food source?

I have fossils of dinosaurs.

So do I. So what? I tend to rely on the observations of people who do this for a living - and whose articles (and opposing ones) I've read for more than twenty years. Plus some field geology -

I'm an hours drive from the Badlands of South Dakota, where one can directly observe the K/T boundary. What's your point? I've hiked there (I don't take fossils from there out of respect, thank you, but I do and have reported my finds)

You have:

1) Meteor
2)?????
3) Profit!!!

Now that was exactly what I meant by trollish responses.

Oh, you also have your stomping of feet regarding my not providing links. I have run several queries of GeoREF for your evidence of large, global floral extictions and have found none.

Well, here's a couple links (I mostly rely on my personal library, but what the hell)

FLORAL TURNOVER AND CLIMATIC CHANGES ASSOCIATED WITH THE CRETACEOUS/PALEOGENE (K/T) BOUNDARY, NORTH DAKOTA, USA;

This one is also worth reading. I have many more. What I don't have is the time, nor the inclination, to post them.

I did, however, run a GeoRef search myself, and you're right. Using "K/T global flora extinction" I found very little. I suspect this is more a problem with my search terms, however, as running a Google search I found a lot more articles (not necessarily peer reviewed, but most were based on PR research). So I consider it likely that my search WRT to GeoRef was poorly worded. You might try different ones (assuming you have time). I don't.

--

Anyway, I'm sorry about the troll comment. This is an issue that I've been reading about since I saw the original Alvarez papers, and I'm thoroughly convinced. Disagreement tends to push my buttons :) and I'm busy enough that I tend to give short shrift to the arguments - not that I want to, it's just the way life is.

This is really interesting to me, but, like I said before, let's move it to my journal, or elsewhere (and you might want to google usenet, BTW), if you'd like to continue. I'd love to have something interesting to blog about there, other than slashdot stuff. In any case, this discussion on slashdot about this subject is completely irrelevant, and I'm sure you have better things to do (like writing more papers :)

This whole discussion reminds me somewhat of the debates about plate tectonics in the '60s :)

This will be my last post in this thread. Thanks for the discussion, but it's inappropriate to continue it here.

SB

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[bfischer]

umm actually there are a couple of references in the old testament to animals that certainly sound like dinosaurs.

Ask the turtles and crocs about "cold" blood

[ianscot]

...being cold blooded they are less resistant to climactic change. A period of dynamic weather, with patterns changing faster than migration could handle, would tend to be very bad for anything cold blooded.

Turtles and crocodiles seem to have survived the mass extinction(s) of the dinosaur age quite well. Both are ectotherms, neither migrates especially far. The general "coldbloodedness = vulnerability to the extinction" correlation just plain isn't there. The major case we're talking about, the dinos, is an open question to start with -- cold-blooded? Endotherms? Somewhere in between? Varying by species?

Something on the scale of the impact we're talking about would have all sorts of indirect effects. Mass extinctions, too, are going to be complex events, which is one big reason to be skeptical of any single-impact idea. For my money, what we have is a correlation -- not a causal link we can describe in concrete ways.

The model I always think of is Krakatoa's eruption in 535 AD. Global climate change kicked in just after that -- years without any harvest in Europe, extreme volatility. There are people who think that eruption changed human history: ushered in the "dark ages," partly caused or influenced the rise of Islam, destabilized governments, and so on. Maybe so -- but this is an event well within recorded human history, and it's still pretty doubtful trying to connect all the causes with their effects. That's if we accept the volcano -> weather changes link to start with.

Simple biological example: take ammonites and nautiloids. Similar chambered-shell mollusc floaters, right? Why did ammonites die out after the crateceous event, while at least a few nautiloids didn't? Ammonites were by far the more dominant critters before the extinction. Were there differences in their reproductive strategies, so that Nautiloids could "wait out" a bad phase better? What? It just ain't that simple.

(As far as mammals eating sleeping dinos at night, there were early mammals for a long time during the age of the dinosaurs. The jurassic, at least.)

Re:Ask the turtles and crocs about "cold" blood

[fbform]

The model I always think of is Krakatoa's eruption in 535 AD. Global climate change kicked in just after that -- years without any harvest in Europe, extreme volatility.

For people interested in following that up, the hypothesis was proposed by David Keys, who speculates in his book and BBC program Catastrophe (1999) that several events in world history in the 6th century AD were all linked to a volcanic eruption, which he feels is most probably Krakatoa.

There is some scepticism towards this theory, specifically the fact that Antarctic ice cores don't have any record of volcano-related climate change in the 6th century. But the jury's still out, and there is no evidence yet to prove or disprove David Keys's hypothesis conclusively.

Re:Ask the turtles and crocs about "cold" blood

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, even though the Western half of the Roman Empire was in tatters, in the middle of the 6th century the Eastern Roman Empire was doing great under emperor Justinian. They reconquered parts of the West, kept down the Persians in the east and built the maginificent church of Hagia Sophia. There are certainly no indications of an environmental catastrophe.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[b-baggins]

And then, patting yourself on the back for being so smart, you quickly went on to prove that black is white and got killed at the next zebra crossing.

Second disaster?

[Mick Ohrberg]

I think the initial meteor was followed by a time period where all the big dinosaurs litigated eachother into oblivion, where all the bigger animals tried to sue the smaller mammals for infringing on their turf.

Well, we all know now what came out of that...

What About Woody Allen?

[serutan]

This reminds me of Woody's Second Lone Gunman theory about the JFK assassination -- that Kennedy was shot by two guys who had nothing to do with each other, just an incredible coincidence.

Damn Indians...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Now their stealing our asteroid collisions too!

Re:Damn Indians...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now their stealing our asteroid collisions

Now our stealing your asteroid collisions?? What the heck does that mean? Of what are you accusing us?

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[SparafucileMan]

Jesus didn't say much about the Old Testiment. So when he was referring to God's children, he probably meant 'all living things' or 'everything in the universe' sort of thing.

Re:Keller's Conclusions [weakly] Refuted

[Captain Morgan]

The BBC mentioned this story the other day, the basic argument people have is that the analysis missed some very basic things, something about crystal formations that were mis-attributed.

Major Scientists Disagree

[jbischof]

Too bad that many major scientists think that this conclusion is totally wrong given the evidence presented. (At least according to some NPR program I listened to).

It was always obvious..

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, everyone knows Second Impact was in the Antarctic around the year 2000, right?

I dunno about you guys, but I've got my house picked out in Tokyo-3 already! I should get a great view of all the giant robot battles!!

Misuse of Probability

[Winkhorst]

The only thing I really have trouble with is the Carl-Saganish misuse of probability. The fact that something happened once doesn't make it any less likely to happen the next day. The odds remain the same.

The second misuse of probability here is the assumption that there's no causal relation between the two events. They are simply treated as random occurrences, which fact is not in evidence. For all we know the two meteors could have been parts of the same original object on the same orbital path.

Re:Misuse of Probability

[newhoggy]

The second misuse of probability here is the assumption that there's no causal relation between the two events. They are simply treated as random occurrences, which fact is not in evidence. For all we know the two meteors could have been parts of the same original object on the same orbital path.

That's a fair argument, but it only applies to the 300k year separation.

If I read correctly, in addition to the timing of two events, the two events also supposedly happened in the same place. Given a spinning Earth, even if the events were separated by only days (negligable in geological time scales) it is extremely unlikely (but not impossible) for it to occur at the same position.

That is reason enough for me to stick to the old theory for now.

Re:Misuse of Probability

[newhoggy]

Something about the indian ocean.

I'll go hide in my shell now.

Re:Misuse of Probability

[princxixor]

For all we know the two meteors could have been parts of the same original object on the same orbital path.

Exactly! What happened was this; the dinosaurs sent Bruce Willis up to destroy the meteor before it impacted Earth. Unfortunately, the dinosaur's nuclear bombs were still fairly primitive, so instead of destroying the meteor, it merely split it in two.

Re:Misuse of Probability

[CanarDuck]

No, this is a correct use of probability. If you play the lottery with a 1/1000 chance of winning, and win on a certain day, then it's right that your chance of winning on the next day is still 1/1000. However, this is not relevant here, because in this case the reasoning is _a posteriori_ , after the events happened: if you win twice in a row, it is true to say that you had a 1/1000,000 chance for this to happen, and this is the relevant reasoning here.

Re:Misuse of Probability

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. The new theory says that 300,000 years separate the two events.

The probability of widely separated swamp environments having NO plant matter deposited between the two events over 300,000 years is really, really low.

That there may have been two events closely related in time and space is quite plausible (but remember we cover quite a bit of distance in our orbit before we would present the same face to another asteroid on the same path). To separate them in time you need to explain the cessation of deposition.

Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath

[Anonymous Coward]

Extinctions on the continents
The only groups for which a detailed record of change has been established are terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates and plants, to which discussion must accordingly be confined. However, it is worth noting that for the extremely important and diverse insect faunas, for which the fossil record has improved considerably in recent years, there are no indications of any significant change across the K-T boundary (Labandeira and Sepkoski 1993). Nor is there any good evidence of an extinction event among birds (Chiappe 1995).

Vertebrates
Although they attract the greatest popular interest, dinosaurs are one of the least satisfactory groups for this kind of study, because of the paucity of suitable stratal sections and the comparative scarcity of fossil material. Virtually all the conclusions that have been drawn about the final dinosaur extinction episode derive from a few sections in the North American Western Interior, arguably the only complete succession of vertebrate-bearing strata across the K-T boundary, with the best sections being in eastern Montana. For all we know, the group might well have gone extinct in other parts of the world before the end of the Cretaceous, or even locally have persisted into the Palaeocene. In any case, too much has been made of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur mass extinction as a unique event. In fact, as Padian and Clemens (1985) have pointed out, the dinosaur generic turnover rate was exceptionally high throughout the group's history, and the most unusual feature of the end-Cretaceous event was the failure of a new replacive group of dinosaurs to emerge. The implication of the high generic turnover rate is that dinosaurs were always relatively vulnerable to extinction throughout their long history, and that no environmental event of exceptional magnitude need necessarily be invoked.

Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath, A. Hallam and P.B. Wignall

Silly folks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly scientists! We all know that satan put those dinosaur bones there to fool true believers into thinking the world was really millions of years old and had been host to thousands of 'extinct' species. We all know that the world is less than ten thousand years old, created in seven days by the lord god Yahew.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[back_pages]

First of all, you can't reason with a fanatic. I'm not rushing off to m-w.com, but I'm pretty sure that irrationality is part and parcel of being a fanatic.

Second of all, the Chinese have had a continuous history and civilization for thousands of years -- it predates the flood of the Old Testament. You can find a reference for that yourself. They are abundant.

You may find my arrogance amusing, but that's only possible because Christian fanatics forcibly inject all sorts of negative personality traits into people with half a clue - jealousy, evilness, arrogance, take your pick. There's no arrogance on my part, only rational conclusions, many of which are based on the Bible. There are countless irrational explanations for Chinese people and only one rational one. It takes an irrational conclusion to support the Old Testament's claim of a global flood, and yet another to declare that Chinese people are not some sort of abomination of God.

The alternative is the stunning realization that the Bible was not, is not, and never will be a history book. That was obvious to Christians from the years 100 through the late 1800s. Christian fundamentalism sprouted primarily in America, among people horribly unqualified to debate theology, and only in the last 100-150 years. And to the halfwits, everybody who laughs at them will appear arrogant.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[back_pages]

The Chinese have a continuous culture and history that predates the flood of the Old Testament. That flood destroyed all people except for Noah's descendants. The Chinese didn't notice any unusual floods for at least 100 years in either direction from the date given by the most vocal Christian fundamenalists for Noah's flood.

It's either a fact that Noah's flood was not global, refuting the Bible; or a fact that Chinese written history is a fraud, refuting the legitimacy of any ancient written document such as the Bible. The only thing that separates the Bible from other ancient texts is the belief that it was authored by God which is an obvious fallacy. Take Old Testament 101 in any college and you'll spend a great amount of time studying the ample evidence that the OT has been edited, by whom, when, where, and how many times.

And as I've said elsewhere, even the notion that the Bible is a historically accurate document is brand new - less than 150 years old. The idea itself is not consistent and can only be supported by countless leaps of "faith", known to educated people as "pseudo science", "fallacy", and "make believe".

The Bible is an infinitely valuable document and an irreplaceable component of many people's spirituality, but a history text it is not.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[back_pages]

Not sure who Velikovsky is, but I'm intimiately familiar with the argument.

In short, everybody has a story about a big flood a long time ago, therefore (jump to conclusion) Noah's flood story is accurate.

Completely dismissed is the idea that all primitive civilizations needed to live near water. Almost all primitive civilizations had poor methods for measuring the passage of time. All rivers flood. Floods are rare, devastating, and worth remembering, even more so are the extra rare super floods.

Rather than conclude that the entire world MUST have flooded, isn't it infinitely more rational to conclude that every primitive civilization has experienced a traumatic flood at some point and that their method of remembering that event doesn't hold up to modern standards? Of course every civilization has a story about a horrible flood that happened long ago. They all need water, rivers flood, "long ago" could mean anything.

Not that this alone proves that Noah's flood didn't happen, but rather it is just as much evidence for and against Noah's flood.

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article "The Day the World Burned" by Kring and Durda in the Dec. 2003 issue of Scientific American:

Based on studies of fossil plants, spores, and pollens, Kirk R. Johnson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and his colleagues concluded that 51 percent of angiosperm species, 36 percent of gymnosperms, and 25 percent of ferns and fern allies were extinguished in North America. The fossil pollen suggests that deciduous trees survived better than evergreen trees, perhaps because they could lie dormant.

The article also mentions why: forest fires. The initial impact itself would have been bright enough to ignite fires in any vegetation within visible range, but the real kicker was the debris that was launched from the impact, much of which entered space, some comoing down quickly in a trail pointing westward (due to eastward rotation of the Earth under the debris trail), but some of which made half orbits to the antipodal (opposite) side of the Earth and reentered. It was the heat from the reentring debris which first dried and then ignited vegetation over vast swaths of ground in both hemispheres, especially North America and India.

Re:Wrong

[geomon]

Not wrong.

You assume in your attack that there was a "North America" and and "India" during the K/T time frame.

A cursory inspection of the plate movements and alignments during this period of time reveals that your debris track would have collided with Africa as well.

Do the authors indicate that there were massive forest extinctions, or just massive forest fires? Which mechanism caused the decline of the dinosaurs? Was the extinction just in North America?

Problems, problems......

Lake Toba, Sumatra

[ynotds]

Apparently just 75,000 years ago Lake Toba was the site of the biggest eruption in the last 2 million years. This site even provides a comparison to Yellowstone.

This eruption may not have caused more than local and marginal extinctions, but it certainly seems to have had a significant impact on the early expansion of homo sapiens sapiens who within 10,000 years had made it across a significant stretch of open sea to reach Australia. And that, of course, produced many extinctions.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[BeatlesForum.com]

I am a fundamentalist conservative Christian, so here's my perspective:

I really don't care whether or not there is water or life or anything else on Mars. Whatever exists out there, I know God created it.

Now, I have never understood the reasoning behind arguments on non-salvation issues like water on Mars. I'm here to tell you: you can believe there are 20 billion Martian programmers whose jobs have been outsourced to Venus. The Bible is the plan for salvation. Christ is Lord and he is coming back soon. Believe in Him and have eternal life.

Pretty good actually

[ynotds]

Astronomical events happen on astronomical timescales, so if you accept the argument that even one dinosaur killer asteroid managed to get its orbit disrupted sufficiently to head our way, then there would most likely have been a few more disrupted by whatever caused that disruption, and/or by consequent events.

Now you put a large enough asteroid in an earth intersecting orbit, and ask yourself just how long it will take to either collide, or have its orbit further disrupted by a sufficiently near miss, and, I suspect, estimates of the order of hundreds of thousands of years would not be unreasonable. There is a lot of space out there.

(I still like the notion that there might have been a brief flourishing of technological dinosaur society which decided that the best way to benefit from the resources in the asteroid belt was to move some nearer to earth, but can't seriously imagine that there would be no other surviving evidence of such a society.)

One more reason to go back to the moon permanantly is so we can do a proper age census of significant craters where the archive isn't subject to plate tectonics.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[corngrower]

Even more eye-opening is the fact that literal interpretations of the Bible are extremely new. Such intellectual hobbling wasn't popular until the 19th or 20th century

Me thinks Galeleo would disagree.

Cold did em in.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go a long ways towards figuring out "What killed the Dinosaurs?" when you realize that

THEY WERE NOT ALL KILLED.

Animals A:cold-blooded (reptiles, fish) and B:warm blooded with i:fur (mammals) or ii:feathers (birds) SURVIVED.

Animals warm blooded WITHOUT fur/feathers died out.

It was cold what done 'em in, Sherlock.

Weak point in the commentary

[mengel]

From the article:

... Dr Joanna Morgan, of Imperial College, London, UK, told BBC News Online: "An impact the size of Chicxulub occurs on Earth about every 100m years. "That two such impacts occurred within 300,000 years and both hit the Earth at almost exactly the same place is statistically unlikely."

I think there are numerous explanations of why asteroids might hit earth in "clumps".

After all when Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter, it hit as at least 21 discernable fragments. If some of them had missed the first time, they would probably have hit some time later, being on intersecting orbits and all.

Re:Velikovsky

[ogre57]

Not sure who Velikovsky is ..

Immanuel Velikovsky. His first three books were published in the '50's. I ran across them in the late '70's. His basic thesis was that some ancient myths may be based on actual observed events. Result, he was widely reviled as a crank by defenders of the Holy Writ of both Organized Religion and Organized Science, and apparently still is today. Subsequent discoveries have proven he was wrong about a few things, right about a few others.

Iirc (from over 20 years ago), he never suggested the Noah's flood story as written was accurate. More like .. point out the widespread prevalence and similarities of flood stories in various cultures, plus something such as the existence of seashell bearing strata found high in the Andes, how that didn't fit current theory (Darwinian-type gradualism), suggest a possible explanation that included the anomalous data rather than ignoring it.

bio/non-bio origin of oil

[pwarf]

Here is a nice Nature article on point.

To summarize: oil can definitely form non-biologically. However, chemical analysis indicates that most oil is formed biologically.

I unfortunately don't have time right now to sift through the UCLA paper linked to in the article, but note that the date of review is in 2002. This is not settled science, so it is very reasonable that schools would still be teaching the more established theory. (Granted, the idea coal or oil comes from animals rather than plants is silly. I hope very few people are actually teaching that.)

Also, if you're going to debunk theories, post links to reputable sites. Otherwise, it's hard to distinguish from the /. noise.

Why does slashdot report BBC articles?

[Tim Ward]

Surely we've all read them on the BBC site first?? - after all, we only come to slashdot when looking for light entertainment after reading all the real news.

Aww fawk...

[diablobsb]

And then Atuk, our great-great-great-great-great grandfather looked up to the sky and said:

"OH FUCK! NOT AGAIN...."

Sure, except for Ice Ages.

[Fantastic Lad]

While some of the points noted in the material quoted are valid, one should be careful not to get too caught up in thinking in black and white terms

Die-offs certainly have happened, and Ice Ages don't come along for no reason.

Academia can be used to either enlighten or to bury one's head. False security is more dangerous than none at all.

-FL

Obligatory Evangelion joke

[anicholo]

"The second impact may have been in the Indian Ocean."

False, false, false!!!

Anyone who has seen Neon Genesis Evangelion knows that the Second Impact was on 2000 in the North Pole!

Heard on the radio that...

[msafar]

This theory is being debunked wholesale. Faulty research based on false data.

Original researcher is fuming mad about it too!

MOD DOWN RACIST

[Anonymous Coward]

racist post makes no sense MOD DOWN

american genocide and now its +3 funny? sad.

Re:MOD DOWN RACIST

[WIAKywbfatw]

Oh My God. Learn to spot a joke. But if you want proof that I'm not racist towards Indians, why don't you look at some of my posts in recent discussions.*

You'll note that in every case I'm the one defending India against some accusation or other made by someone who has a "India is bad because..." attitude. And those are only the posts that I could find in the last five minutes. There are plenty more like that.

Oh yeah, you might also want to look at this post that I made less than an hour an a half before the joke that you object to. Praising Ghandi for being an outstanding human being in a journal discussion isn't what you'd find from a real racist, is it?

If my joke was laughing at anyone it was laughing at the idiots who go through life saying "India sucks, USA rocks".

(* Click the links then search for my name. It's not that hard.)

Re:MOD DOWN RACIST

[WIAKywbfatw]

Oh yeah, you might also want to look at this post that I made less than an hour an a half before the joke that you object to. Praising Ghandi for being an outstanding human being in a journal discussion isn't what you'd find from a real racist, is it?

I forgot to include the link to the post. Here it is now.

I think I've proved my point.

The simplest answer is usually the correct one.

[esobofh]

Similar to what americans will eventually do to themselves, the dinosaurs went extinct because they were too big. They used too many inputs, and didn't provide enough usable output to sustain their lives. The top of the food chain tends to topple off the pyramid and everyone else below moves up. Gas guzzling SUVs and the highest consumer rates are very similar to eating too many plants and animals. That, and if you end up faced with either one your best option is to play dead or run.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes an irrational conclusion to support the Old Testament's claim of a global flood, and yet another to declare that Chinese people are not some sort of abomination of God.

What are you talking about??? You're spewing stuff out that doesn't make any sense.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Daengbo]

No offense, but literary deconstruction, while popular, should not be used on historical documents to decide how many writers there were, when the changes were made, or especially what the beliefs of these multiple writers were.
As I assume you're an engineer, I am amazed that you ate up the statistical joke that is deconstructionalism simply because it helped to disprove the historical basis of the bible. There is plenty of evidence for that position already: you don't need to marginalize your intellect to get it.

My relevant links

Stegosaurs

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to recall a PBS-NOVA documentary about research on Stegosaurus fossils...they were able to determine that the "bony plates" that ran the length of their spine were hollow...like swiss cheese. The theory went that blood vessels followed this network of "holes". Sort of like a "radiator" structure, enabling the stegosaurus to "cool off", maintaining a more constant body temperature. Much like mammals do. I think that was the first mention, that I can recall, that some dinos were warm-blooded. Then of course came the warm blooded T-Rex theories by Robert whats-his-name.

I think that that warm- and cold-blooded dinos existed simultaneously. I'd even suggest that the warm blooded ones became smaller and quicker, some evolving into mammals, maybe.

Mark

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[shadowbearer]

I'm seriously curious; if you can't use literary deconstruction to analyze historical writings to determine when and by whom they've been edited, then what tool can you use, assuming that there aren't a lot of verifiable external historical documents to compare against?

I'm not a lit major/historian/etc either, more of an scientist, somewhat of an engineer. So I'm curious to know how exactly one *would* determine the authenticity of a document which has obviously been rewritten many thousands of times over the historical period which you are looking at, without looking for consistencies/inconsistencies among the writing itself, and comparing them to what you know of the documents history...

SB
(an athiest, but one who has read several dozen current revisions of the bible)

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Daengbo]

I'm seriously curious; if you can't use literary deconstruction to analyze historical writings to determine when and by whom they've been edited, then what tool can you use, assuming that there aren't a lot of verifiable external historical documents to compare against?

There is no tool. You can't determine anything, really.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[connorbd]

Somewhat, but if you're defending Velikovsky let me remind you that he had a habit of making stuff up as he went along (the conflation of Athena with Aphrodite, for example) and distorting data points he relied upon.

It is true that Carl Sagan botched his critique of Velikovsky. But that doesn't mean Velikovsky was right.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[shadowbearer]

I'm not being a troll when I say this, but what you just said makes your whole argument bunk. I'm sure you realize that :)

SB

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Daengbo]

I didn't make any argument except to say that deconstruction shouldn't be counted on, which I followed by saying that there is really no tool which can establish with any certainty when and by whom a certain historical document was created and/or edited. I don't see that I contradicted myself at all.
Enlighten me, please.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[shadowbearer]

If there is no tool that can be used to determine it, there is no way to disprove the theory that is being used to determine it. Therefore you can't say with certainty that deconstruction is not valid.

Making an argument against a certain method, then when challenged on it, saying there is no way to "determine anything, really" means that you don't have any evidence either way.

Basically it's a strawman argument. If you want to debunk literary deconstructionism, do so with facts, not just by saying that it can't be used to analyze a document. That was the point of my first response.

SB

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[Daengbo]

Well, since, in my original post, I provided three links attempting to "debunk deconstructionism," I think that I satisfy your criteria. In fact, saying " If there is no tool that can be used to determine it, there is no way to disprove the theory that is being used to determine it" puts you right in the biblical scholars' section of faith. I look for methods with verifiable results, which this tool does not provide at all, and to attempt to bring a tool which offers nothing but opinions into a scientific discussion is useless. Perhaps worse than useless.
I made no strawman argument, but merely pointed out that no tool currently exists to do this, and that at this time, we can't tell much of anything with any certainty. I will not and did not make the statement that this can never be. I'm through wasting my time with this.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[TJmoney]

Chinese had a society at the time with written history that has no details of an unusual flood. The floods that happen with a frequency of 50 or 100 years in China would be considered HIGHLY unusual in the rest of the world, probably described as a plauge set forth by god. It's always been normal for huge populations to die in China from floods. In theory that story could have even come from China, although I believe one of the most popular theories for the origion of that story is the re-filling of the black sea after sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.

Re:Religious fanatics, unite! The end is very nigh

[shadowbearer]

I apologize; I missed the links in your original post.

I *do* believe that one can trace back influences in a particular piece of writing, if you have enough references; no, I don't think it's 100% accurate, but I think one can at least trace back enough to find similarites with sufficient correlations to other writing styles that it's likely that one has found the original (or close) author. Finding historical references to the author which have no direct ties is another question.

On the tool note, I do believe that some etymology comparison programs are good enough to trace back origins - but I think that people are better. I'm no expert in that field - I just go on my instincts; which means I can see traces of influences in most every piece of writing I read nowadays. I guess that was what led me to argue with you.

In any case, I need to get some sleep; if you want to continue this, post a note in my journal.

In humility, seriously: you've made me think about this. Sorry if it's not very coherent, it's late here.

SB

Re:Velikovsky

[ogre57]

But that doesn't mean Velikovsky was right.

Ancient memory, wasn't defending nor attacking. Iirc some of his notions were well out there, so no surprise if any such have since been proven wrong. Otoh among his "impossible wild radical crank" predictions was that Venus would be retrograde and much hotter than expected, since proven to be correct. Right or wrong, have seen him referred to as a 'Father of Catastrophism', which arguably includes the whole "meteors wiped out the dinosaurs" bit.

A hotly denied ongoing since forever he got dead right .. so-called "scientists" who discard data that doesn't fit their pet theories instead of changing the theory to fit the data. Some today term that junk science.

Side note, even if Velikovsky had been wrong in every particular, the treatment he received at the time was shameful, disgusting, roughly equivalent to modern political attack ads. Such has no valid place in any scientific discipline.

One possibility (maybe)

[BoogieChile]

Possibly some kind of genetic collapse?

I remeber reading a story somewhere that cheetahs were pretty much certain to become extinct because they lacked the genetic diversity to ensure longterm survival. Or it might have been because they were at the point where there were too many cousins marrying and the aggregating genetic weaknesses (congenital defects, I think I mean) would end up wiping them out.

Bananas, too are supposed to be headed for extinction because they don't produce seeds. And, I suppose, horses and a lot of modern dog breeds wouldn't survive for too long without humans constant intervention.

How long could it take a species to die out that way?

My theory.

[Anonymous Coward]

My theory of the dinosaurs.

1. SCO sues dinos on lame grounds
2. Dinos choke on laughter.
3. SCO goes into hibernation for 3 billion years.
4. SCO awakens and discovers linux.

Dinoguys

[fm6]

I still like the notion that there might have been a brief flourishing of technological dinosaur society which decided that the best way to benefit from the resources in the asteroid belt was to move some nearer to earth, but can't seriously imagine that there would be no other surviving evidence of such a society.)

Why? Even assuming that dino-primate artifacts would be recognizably artificial (not a big assumption, but an assumption all the same), absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fossils that have actually been dug up are the tinniest fraction of the fossils out there, which in turn are the tinniest fraction of the things that might have been fossilized, but weren't. So just because nobody's found a fossilized can of dino-beer, doesn't mean there never was one!

The dinosaurs that are in the museums are beasts like the tyrannosaur and apatosaur, which flourished for millions of years. Compare that with our noble selves, who've been around for half a million years, but haven't been numerous for more than a few thousand. And at the rate we're going, we're unlikely to make it for another thousand. If your hypothetical dinoguys followed the same pattern, small wander they didn't leave much trace.

The real problem with your theory also has to do with percentages. The odds of accidentally hitting the earth with an asteroid that you were just trying to bring closer are vanishingly small. As you say, the odds are literally astronomical. Now, if somebody were trying to hit the earth...