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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
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.
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Dinosaurs? Bloodsucking Insects?
Is this another Music Industry article?
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...
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
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!
...it was video, warming up for the radio star.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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)
It might work! But only if that insects - along with carrying various diseases - also carried giant, planet-killing asteroids with them. If we just call the "Dinosaur Period" the Jurassic through Cretaceous, that lasted from 200 million years before now to 65 million years before now (+/- 5-10 million years). I find it kind of hard to swallow that Dinosaurs couldn't build up an immunity to disease over a period of 135 [i]million[/i] years. Viruses can evolve and change hundreds of times in the course of a human lifetime (which you can't even measure with Geologic time). If Viruses were around for 135 million years when Dinosaurs were around, the Dinosaurs had to have pretty hefty immune systems to be able to cope with all the new viruses evolving. And considering that they actually lasted until a giant rock fell out of the sky, I'd say that getting head colds probably didn't do them in.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
It's not specific blood-bourne pathogens, it's blood-bourne pathogens in general. We have lots of complicated mechanisms that have developed over millions of years of evolution that provide a lot of protection.
And yes, there are a number of genes that code for malaria resistance in human beings; they exist wherever malaria is common. The most well known (and most common?) is the sickle cell gene. But there are a number of other mechanisms that have evolved independently that protect people from malaria. If your ancestors had a lot of trouble with malaria, you are probably much more resistant to it than someone whose ancestors came from Norway.
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
Although "Dinosaur" is used very widely, and often used to refer to extinct reptiles like the Pliseosaur, Pteridon, or Leoplurodon; the groups wiped out were, properly speaking, the Therapods (popularly the T-Rex, Velociraptors, and their kin) and the Sauropods (Brachiasaur, Triceritops, etc). Neither of these groups survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretatious period.
Sharks are sharks, Ceolocanths are fish, and Aligators are reptiles. Although all three forms date back very nearly how they look now to the time of the dinosaurs, it would be an equivocation to call them "dinosaurs" when discussing the "extinction of the dinoasurs".
Apologies for spelling, mine is pretty poor.
'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).
"and the Sauropods (Brachiasaur, Triceritops, etc)"
Triceratops wasn't a sauropod. Like other marginocephalians, it was a member of one of three orithischian (bird hipped) groups (the other two are threophora which includes armoured dinosaurs such as ankylosaurus and stegosaurus, and ornithopods such as the hadrosaurs). Sauropods were saurischian (lizard hipped), and are therefore more closely related to therapods than either are to the ornithischians.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
In short, it is unlikely that biting insects could be responsible for all this chaos. The extinction was simultaneous, worldwide, and (in geological terms) instantaneous, it hit animals and plants, and it hit organisms on land and in the sea. Now, it turns out, probably not coincidentally, that at the same time all of this happens, a huge asteroid or comet impact- one of the biggest in the past half-billion years- takes place in the Yucatan, blasting dust into the stratosphere, sending tidal waves across Texas, and probably igniting much of North America in the process. An asteroid impact is probably capable of causing an extinction like this. Its doubtful that gnats, mites, and mosquitos could.
Ummm...
Ow...that post hurt my head. Someone left the door unlocked and a paleontologist got in!!??