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Did Insects Kill the Dinosaurs?
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Asteroid impacts, massive volcanic flows, and now biting, disease-carrying insects have been put forward as an important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs. In the Late Cretaceous the world was covered with warm-temperate to tropical areas that swarmed with blood-sucking insects. A theory explored by researchers at Oregon State suggests these bugs carried leishmania, malaria, intestinal parasites, arboviruses and other pathogens. Repeated epidemics may have slowly-but-surely worn down dinosaur populations while ticks, mites, lice and biting flies tormented and weakened them. 'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.' The confluence of new insect-spread diseases, loss of traditional food sources, and competition for plants by insect pests could all have provided a lingering, debilitating condition that dinosaurs were ultimately unable to overcome."
Dinosaurs couldn't slap mosquitos, so they all caught malaria?
which is totally what she said
Dinosaurs kill dinosaurs.
I'm sick of all this anti-insect diatribe.
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
This seems unlikely to me. As far as I can tell, every single type of dinosaur died out except for those that went on to become birds. This is like future, intelligent insects blaming the plague for the demise of every type of mammal on the planet.
Ok, lets just make them all happy and say all of the above played a part. Giant meteor hits the Earth, causes dust to obscure the sun and weakens or kills a bunch of plant life. Meanwhile that same impact touches off a bunch of giant lava flows. Finally the dinosaurs already weakened by lack of food are subject to malaria and cough to death on dust clouds. There, all major doom scenarios all rolled into one. Please note, I'm not really serious with this... or am I?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I learned it on MST3K during the movie Future War (which isn't set in the future and doesn't feature a war, natch.)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000#Future_War
Thank you for not killing me.
Comment of the year
Dinosaurs? Bloodsucking Insects?
Is this another Music Industry article?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
A French sci-fi author suggested that ants deliberately waged war on dinosaurs and killed them all (by invading their natural orifices and killing them from the inside) because their large size was detrimental to ant nests.
But frankly, I don't think new diseases would wipe out an entire order of life, all over the world, in all ecological niches, without wiping out other unrelated orders of life. In their hundreds of millions of years of existence, dinos had to fight off insects and diseases that were there before them, it couldn't just wipe them (and just them) off the face of the Earth in such a short time.
You can't take the sky from me...
I thought Chuck Norris killed the dinosaurs?
'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.'
Uh, exactly why would mammals have some natural resistance to these diseases such that they would survive better than the dinosaurs? Especially considering that some mammals (e.g., humans) don't have resistance to Malaria.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
it's not because I touch myself at night?
parasites don't suddenly appear out of thin air and reduce their hosts to extinction
they gradually evolve in tandem with their hosts, and they make sure they always leach off the host's resources, and never kill their host
a parasite is not interested in killing its host. because then the parasite dies too
and a parasite is evolved to infect its host very carefully and specifically. dinosaurs did not suddenly get worms that no other creature ever got before. the worms evolved as the dinosaurs evolved
as for biting insects, this was a major new change. but again, it's not like mosquitoes materialized out of thin air and vampirically drained all the blood in the world. they slowly and gradually evolved to the job they do better and better, but never THAT good a job. never, never, did they kill their hosts. because this would then kill the mosquitoes
so frankly, this story is braindead on some fundamentals of evolution and parasites
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The theory seems a little bit of a stretch, but the recent work suggests that the KT meteor event may have been the straw that broke an ailing camel's back.
Still, lots of stuff did survive, and because "dinosaur" is a rather large and diverse group of animals, the best we can say is that it was, by and large, the megafauna that took the brunt of it, which seems logical, as it would be these species that would be at the top of their prospective ecological niches, and thus the most vulnerable.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
this theory would fit nicely with the "world is only 6000 years old crowd"
i mean swarms of insects were mentioned in the bible (old testament, moses exodus part?) somewhere, i dont remember reading about asteroids in that book
The whole timeline appears a bit fubar here.
"After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them"
Um, the Cretaceous period lasted 75 million years. So while it's plausible that insects caused outbreaks of disease in localized populations I really don't see how anything of pandemic proportions can be inferred. As far as evolved resistance goes, well, the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for a LONG time. Much, much longer than mammals. Unless the diseases described all appeared about 65 million years ago, then there's just no logic here.
Besides that, dinosarus may have died out but many other species did not. This includes reptiles, which would have been affected by the pathogens according by these researchers.
The more I think about this, the more it smells like bullcrap.
I like basketball!!1!
I think everybody knows that Jesus buried the Dinosaurs...cmon.
You might ask what happened Mayan empire? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_collapse This insect thing might not be so far fetched as you think?
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Did insect-borne illnesses weaken the dinosaur species that went extinct before the meteor impact that ultimately led to their extinction, or did the geologic changes caused by the meteor impact weaken the dinosaurs to make them more susceptible to illness?
~Mike (Titan_X)
Admittedly I didn't RTFA, but are these scientists saying that the dinosaurs WEREN'T killed by the huge Chixulub asteroid? I thought it had been pretty much established that that was what happened (iridium concentrations at the K-T boundary, 65M-year old impact crater, 70% of other species kicking the bucket at the same time, etc.)
It seems very unlikely that a whole planet of dinosaurs were killed by insects. It is actually very difficult for insects to cover an entire continent, let alone move from continent to continent. In current times, insects stowaway on ships and planes to travel large distances and between continents. Also, if this were true regarding reptiles, what about crocodiles? They've been living much longer than any of the dinosaurs and the lived in conditions where mosquitoes thrive. How do you explain them?
Too virulent is bad for the host and parasite, so that is an argument against the parasites flourishing in that setting.
What nixes this idea for me is that the microbes didn't grow on Mars and suddenly rain on the dinosaurs out of the blue. Microbes and reptiles all had to grow up together.
You can't take the sky from me...
You are absolutely correct. The authors must have made that same old error. It is done again and again. Over and over.
Why can't people understand, birds are the dinosaurs that survived.
Birds relate to dinosaurs as bats relate to mammals. Or, birds relate to dinosaurs as butterflies relate to insects. It is as simple as that.
That, unread, article must be bad.
that parasitic wasps are going to wipe out their hosts?
of course not
therefore, you understand my point of the supidity of saying parasites wiped out the dinosaurs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I saw this in a movie called "War of the Worlds". Also, I'm surprised that these "findings" weren't somehow applied to global warming ,i.e. if we make the globe warmer then we'll get more biting insects and more diseases. I thought that's where they were going.
We willna be fooled again!
OMG ZERG RUSH! :)
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Com'on. Somebody needs a graduate degree and/or funding gotta come up with some sort of original research, regardless of how far fetched it is. Welcome to the dark side of academia.
There could be something to this theory. Flowering plants originates at about the same time dinosaurs conked out. And to aid pollination by insects, the plants started making high octane fuels (nectar, is almost pure sugar) and the co-evolution of insects and flowering plants raced ahead. There could be something to it, but still we would need more positive evidence. We still have to explain the iridium layer in sediments too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
See previous article...
A killer asteroid... made of INSECTS!
True believers know it was a giant floating brain, while the heretics believe it was from a virus-laden powerplant worker.
What Possibly Went Wrong?
I find it hard to believe that none of the dinosaurs had enough resistance to these diseases to survive and help the species evolve resistancy.
'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new
They were new? I am by no means an authority on the subject, but from what I remember learning about evolution, one-celled-organisms came along before cell colonies. Further, small cell colonies (bugs and such) came around before big ones (dinosaurs and such). I even recall learning that the first self-replicating DNA strands were much more virus-like than bacteria-like...since the whole membrane and organelle system didn't come about until a bit later.
So, by the time the dinosaurs were around, the world should have already been densely populated with viruses, bacteria, and small bugs which could find the guts of a dinosaur to be fertile breeding grounds.
I really don't see how these things, and the diseases they cause, could have come around after the fact. Maybe some more sinister versions of them, more specifically targeted at the dinosaurs of the day, came around after the fact, but I don't think that alone would account for a mass extinction.
If you have corrections to offer, don't hold back (not that you would).
Between meteor strikes, volcanoes, ice ages, and mosquitoes, they didn't have a chance.
and all within the past 6000 years...
the first lawyer was probably the deathknell.
Nope they all died of starvation waiting in line at the DMV
This hypothesis needs to explain who the little feather dinosaurs survived and the others didnt.
Fry: What really killed all the dinosaurs?
Giant Brain: ME!
(pan to screen of Giant Brain using brain laser to kill all dinosaurs)
Wasn't that a Simpsons Halloween episode a few years ago?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Did they die because they had no universal healthcare for all dinosaurs?
like drown em in lots of water or something, I dunno. Say if lots of water was flowin around and it sorta buried stuff. Wouldn't that sho nuff make lots of fossils?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I know of a similar theory to explain why mammals moved back to the sea... (Whales, dolphins, etc) The theory is that the whales were so pissed off at the mosquitos, that they went into the sea just to get a little relief. They stayed there too long, and so their arms and legs turned into fins and flippers. In case anybody is wondering who proposed the theory, well it was me. And no I don't have any scientific evidence to back it up. But it is certainly more plausible than the theory being discussed regarding the dinosaurs...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
When you outlaw insects, only insects will have outlaws... ...or something like that...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
...video killed the radio star.
-- Boycott Shell
Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs... Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth...
Considering time travel is theoretically possible I propose that the dinosaurs were killed when in the future the governments of the world embraced peace and disposed of all nuclear weapons by sending them back to the dawn of time, where they would naturally decay over the eons. Unfortunately one day a pesky Veloca Raptor stumbled upon the weapons and accidentally detonated them all causing a massive nuclear winter which wiped out the Dinosaurs.
I have nothing compelling to say
Dinosaurs died because they where drowning in amber!
At first blush, the plague model makes me wonder about concurrent evolution. It's not really in the interest of any plague to actually kill its victims -- the virulent strains of bubonic plague, for example, are actually not very successful compared to influenza rhinovirus.
The giant asteroid model has some good things going for it, in particular the presence of charcoal fragments in and just above the K/T iridium layer in samples taken from many locations around the world. That seems to support the idea (advanced by Durda, Kring, et al. a few years ago) that heat of re-entry from the giant impact caused a worldwide holocaust (in the literal sense). The animal species that survived fit a pattern that they either could survive in deep water or could hide in holes.
Durda & Kring showed that a Chixculub-sized impact (and, more importantly, re-entry of fragments thrown up into space by the impact) would heat practically the entire outer atmosphere to incandescence for a few days. Under those conditions, the great outdoors would closely approximate the conditions in an electric oven set to "broil".
That seems more plausible than gradually killing them off over time -- I would think that after a few generations, the dinosaurs would become much more resistant and the bugs less virulent.
It seems pretty well established that the K/T boundary is the sudden result of a giant impact, but TFA makes a good case that insects and disease were already causing the dinosaurs to decline gradually but severely in the period leading up to the K/T impact.
Dinosaurs were on their way out by the end of the Cretaceous
anyway. In N. America they had declined from about 35 genera
to about 12 genera by the end of this period. The #1 reason
for their decline was the dropping O2 levels in the atmosphere
caused by the intense volcanic activity that was occurring
due to the breakup of Pangea. O2 levels were about 35% at the peak
of the Cretaceous and are about 21% today. Dinosaurs got big because
they had lots of O2 to breathe. They also didn't need to be warm-blooded
because everywhere it was warm, anywhere from 5 to 10 degrees C. higher
on average than it is today. Big animals take a long time to heat up and
longer to cool off, so no need to be homeothermic.
The number two reason was probably cooling due to increased levels of
aerosols and particulites in the atmosphere from all the volcanism.
So it's getting harder to be a big animal when you can't breathe,
it's getting colder (and you can't regulate your body temp),
and your food supply is changing or disappearing.
Then along comes this pesky meteor that blasts a few billion cubic
meters of dust into the atmosphere and turns out the lights for a
year or two. No heat, no food, no O2, no survival if you need these in
quantity. That's one situation that our mammalian ancestors could cope with
though, because their survival demands were lower.
I've got your sig, right here.
I am just not buying the fact that "blood sucking insects" killed the dinosaurs. There is no evidence that the dinos had attorneys
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
Or perhaps that giant asteroid cracked the Earth's crust in enough places that the land basically flattened out or sunk beneath the ocean. And therefore the water covered the entire face of the earth (within about 40 days maybe0. Then over the next 300 something days the plates shifted around and eventually reformed mountains and ravines, giving us this story of Noah and a global flood that seems to pervade just about every culture around the world.
Besides that, the evaporative cooling from the water run-off as the plates pushed up would likely cause some really nice ice cold temperatures that might help explain our polar ice caps.
However, even if Noah did save two baby dinosaurs for each available dinosaur species, the harsher post asteroid/flood climates and smaller food quantities could make it difficult to survive long term for the really large animals. And if those hungry dinosaurs decided to start eating humans, then I'm sure the humans would opt to eliminate that particular creature.
Hmmm. Somehow I thought I had logged in on that last post.....
Or perhaps that giant asteroid cracked the Earth's crust in enough places that the land basically flattened out or sunk beneath the ocean. And therefore the water covered the entire face of the earth (within about 40 days maybe0. Then over the next 300 something days the plates shifted around and eventually reformed mountains and ravines, giving us this story of Noah and a global flood that seems to pervade just about every culture around the world.
Besides that, the evaporative cooling from the water run-off as the plates pushed up would likely cause some really nice ice cold temperatures that might help explain our polar ice caps.
However, even if Noah did save two baby dinosaurs for each available dinosaur species, the harsher post asteroid/flood climates and smaller food quantities could make it difficult to survive long term for the really large animals. And if those hungry dinosaurs decided to start eating humans, then I'm sure the humans would opt to eliminate that particular creature.
... so we could have oil. Dammit, don't you people read the Bible?
Obviously, the Dinos were wiped out by Man, around 6000 BC
If your average run of the mill dinosaur evolved in a pristine, disease free environment and then all of a sudden were dropped into a disease ridden, insect infested world I could see the connection. But, as logic dictates, if they all evolved at the same time in order for them to reach that state of evolution they would have had to develop an immunity in order to even progress in such an environment. My non-professional two cents for what it's worth.
"I reject your reality and substitue my own." ~ Adam Savage, Mythbuster extraordinaire.
"Repeated epidemics may have slowly-but-surely worn down dinosaur populations while ticks, mites, lice and biting flies tormented and weakened them. 'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.'"
Uh, "vertebrates"? So the same epidemics should have caused the same problems for all the mammals, birds, and reptiles around at the time, yet they survived. And dinosaurs *flourished* in the Cretaceous Period, particularly the Late Cretaceous. They achieved their maximum species diversity at that time. It's one of the things that makes their extinction that much more dramatic.
What changed about insects in the final years of the Cretaceous that made them suddenly more serious problems than they were for tens of millions of years prior in the rest of the Cretaceous Period? And what evidence is there for such a dramatic transformation of insect-carried pathogens at the very end? Nothing, as far as I can see.
I'll pile this hypothesis with all the other obviously bogus extinction hypotheses for dinosaurs, right along with dinosaurs getting drugged on flowering plants and mammals eating their eggs, both of which aren't consistent with the observed pattern either.
New Zealand split off from Australia about 65 MYA, and since that time has been isolated except from flying creatures.
There were dinosaurs in New Zealand after the split, yet they also died out about the same time as their kin elsewhere---despite their isolation.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
"When it's not one thing, it's another. It's always something"
Roseanne Roseannadanna, c 1978
(OMG, it's been thirty years!)
What does it matter if it was brain dead or not? Someone got paid for this example of mental masturbation and that's what matters most: publish & keep the grant money flowing. Or maybe it was an inside joke where the parasites are the researchers & their grad students and the dinosaurs are the institutions stupid enough to give them money.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/28/1517229
yes they did, and we're next
with all due respect, where'd you get the idea that parasites "never, never...kill their hosts"?
While I agree with your point that a successful parasitic mutation means getting better at leeching, without having the host die, surely you can't then assume that all is well in parasitic (NOT symbiotic) relationships, and that nobody dies from having a parasite?
Mosquitoes are older than dirt. They know what they are doing, and they are not interested in having us die from blood-sucking, true. But Mosquitoes inadvertently carry malaria, which WILL kill us. Millions upon millions of people die from malaria every year. Plasmodium do not particularly care if we die or not, so long as their young get to leave the dying host and infect a new organism.
[off-topic]Actually, it's in our best interest not to kill off our host planet, sure, but if we are offered a free and easy way to a new planet full of untapped resources, we would care even less about finishing it off[/off-topic]
they were all allergic ;-).. ROTFLOL
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
How could a bug kill a dinosaur? Have you seen how large a dinosaur is? Capable of ripping a man in half it is! What can a bug do? Eat some smaller bugs? Maybe annoy you with incessant buzzing? I for one do not welcome our weak, tiny and harmless incestoid over-*dies of malaria*
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
It wasn't insects that killed the dinosaurs, it was allergies. They were allergic to huge asteroids. In fact they were allergic to anything that blasted them and burned them for days, then froze them for months, and starved them for years.
OTOH, any mosquito that could draw blood from a tyrannosaur must have been shaped like a road drill - which would make it awkward to fly. Perhaps they climbed the treeferns and dived on them from a great height...
- Asteroid crits Dinosaurs for 5460 damage
- Dinosaur yells : OMGWTF!
- Volcanoes Rain of Fire hits Dinosaurs for 500 damage
- Mosquitoes Disease dots Dinosaurs for 150 damage per decade
- Dinosaurs calls out for healing
- Dinosaurs dies
- Dinosaurs drops the flag
- Mammals return the flag to base
- Mammals wins!
(the grammar is intentional btw)
You can't take the sky from me...
"I wish I wish I hadn't squished that fish"
Sorry, but for years now, my hypothesis was that dinosaurs were wiped out by what is considered as a relatively (at least to their carriers) innocuous bacteria, specifically salmonella. Almost every so called descendant of the dinosaur to date carries salmonella. And even to this day, said bacteria is fatal to pretty much every non reptilian and poultry based form of life. Consider too that most of these critters migrate on a regular basis, and you may even be able to explain a lot of mass die offs over time.
So even as the plates began to drift, regardless of asteroids or changes in climate, if a gut bacteria such as salmonella kicked in for any species that relied on bacteria for digestion (like 100% of herbivorous dinosaurs), then it could hypothetically override their respective digestive bugs, preventing them from absorbing much needed nutrients. As they in turn died off from the inevitable starvation, then the meat eaters found themselves short on food. In essense, this could explain the mass extinctions occuring overnight on a geological scale.
Unfortunately, there is little way to make what should be the simplest explanation in turn becomes a dead end. Yet since they found a fossilized raptor with feather anchors on its bones, the link between dinosaurs and fowl isn't as farfetched as it seems.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Animal guts are a fairly acidic and nasty habitat for most bacteria. I can easily imagine that while there were lots of single celled organisms, to begin with none of the single celled animals could live there. When, suddenly, some single celled organisms find mechanisms to survive in there, this would definitely result in a massive readjustment of the ecology. These single celled organisms don't even have much pressure to allow their host to survive since there would be many hosts with no resistance and since they would still be pretty well evolved for surviving outside.
As far as the viruses go; the key point about a virus is that it isn't self hosting. The earliest creatures had to be self hosting since there wouldn't be anything else to host them. They would be evolved to have mechanisms for survival; for use of nutrients, etc. but nothing for infecting other creatures.
... is that in the last little bit of time they had, intelligent dinosaurs developed, culturally burned their dead (so we don't have the remains), built a technological civilization, then nuked themselves out.
That, or after wiping out the other species of dinosaurs, they got better, and finally Ascended.
mark "no, I'm not Daniel Jackson"
Dick Cheney with a couple of beers inside him and a loaded shotgun could probably account for a huge portion of the extinction.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Sounds like a David and Goliath story of Biblical proportions...
The vast majority of flowers are intended to attract insects. Think about the most notorious disease-spreading insect: mosquitoes -- which are primarily nectar feeders (the males exclusively so). So it's not as if flowering plants only support the existence of cute fuzzy little insect species like butterflies and honeybees. Flowering plants form the base for a sizable percentage of the entire insect population, including many of the ones that spread diseases and parasites.
Insects aren't much better at eating cellulosic biomass than animals are, and blood alone isn't a particularly practical food-source. In fact, are there ANY insects that can subsist entirely on blood? Some arachnids do, but no insects. It's easy to see how the emergence of nectar-producing plants would give rise to vast array of new types of insects, some of which would then be willing to take a bite out of passing dinosaurs to supplement their diets.
"Well, Baldrick, so that's one of the greatest scientific mysteries solved! The dinosaurs were wiped out by the smell of your underwear!"
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Yep! You got that correct! In fact we belong Craniata > Vertebrata > Osteichthyes > Sarcopterygii > Tetrapoda > Mammalia > Primates > Hominidae etc. (Of course this is simplified and open to change) Often, there is some confusion over the term "fish" and in particular "bony fish" as it is applied to two different levels at the same time. One is the Osteichthyes (which translates - bony fish) whereas the other one is the Teleostei which includes what most people would call fish (gars, bowfin, musky, tuna, seahorses etc). The latter group belong to the Osteichthyes too but is an another subgroup separate from ours, Actinopterygii. .
I object, it is not I who need to be consistent in these matters... ;)
Modern classification, however, does it in a consistent manner, except for a few die hard scientists from fifty years ago. They still think birds are "sufficiently different" to warrant a separate category, with a rank higher(!) than dinosaurs. There are even thick books on the subject.
Some early authors even argued that humans should be placed not among apes or mammals, or even animals, but in a Kingdom on its own - Psyche...
The similarity with object orientation and inheritance in programming is not far fetched, as you have guessed.
The principle "is a kind of" is the current paradigm, as is "you cannot change your ancestors" (as easily).
.