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Maybe It Wasn't The Meteor, After All
An anonymous reader writes "In one new argument, David Penny of Massey University in New Zealand and Matt Phillips from the University of Oxford contend the fossil record and the evolution of animals through modern times suggest the demise of dinosaurs began several million years before the catastrophic asteroid collision.
'"We agree completely with the geophysicists that an extraterrestrial impact marks the end of the Cretaceous," said Penny, in a statement reported in newspapers and on the Internet this week. "But after 25 years [scientists] have still not provided a single piece of evidence that this was the primary reason for the decline of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs."'"
Wesley Crusher was annoying as hell. I'm presuming this was good acting on Wil Wheaton's part.
You could've hired me.
> Boy I sure hope Wil Wheaton is not reading Slashdot today :)
If I said Hannibal Lector was the most evil and chilling character in the history of film no one would consider that to be an insult to Mr Hopkins but instead a complement on his acting skills.
Please, no one say Wesley was supposed to be likeable or I'm in deep trouble :-)
Really its a hairsplitting sort of argument. They both agree the meteor killed the dinos. Whether the dinosaurs were in "decline" well -- what's decline mean? One group says the dinos were at the peak of their diversity or whatnot. The other says they were waning. And this is of course based on an incomplete fossil record (both of them).
And there's declines, and consolidations. There used to be more primate species on earth, now there are fewer -- are they in decline? Tough to say yes, tough to say no. Sure, they're in decline in variation, but not in numbers or population. So I'd like to hear more about what both groups mean by "decline".
Just my 2c.
Moo.
This indicates that a extreme amount of dust and ash must've been airborne for many years, blocking much of the sunlight that would normally enable plant life to flourish. While it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were in decline prior to this time, the event that killed them is the same one that ultimately created the K-T.
Oddly enough though, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish survived...
Yet both the bird-hipped and regular-hipped dinosaurs died, pterodactyls were wiped out, and the marine dinosaurs also died.
The meteor probably had a large influence, but I think the actual story is more complicated than "the meteor hit the earth and all of dinosauria decided to die, along with a few related species"