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Some Large Dinosaurs Survived the K-T Extinction
mmmscience sends along coverage from the Examiner on evidence that some dinosaurs survived the extinction event(s) at the end of the Cretaceous period. Here is the original journal article. "A US paleontologist is challenging one of the field's greatest theories: the mass extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. Jim Fassett, a paleontologist who holds an emeritus position at the US Geological Survey, recently published a paper in Palaeontologia Electronica with evidence that points to a pocket of dinosaurs that somehow survived in remote parts New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years past the end of the Cretaceous period. If this theory holds up, these dinosaurs would be the only ones that made it to the Paleocene Age."
only I call them "chickens".
"some dinosaurs survived the extinction event(s)"
If some dinosaurs hadn't survived it/them, we wouldn't have birds.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"So does that mean skimpily clad cavewomen really *did* ride around on dinosaurs? mmmm..."
No, but the good news is modern technology has brought the internet into our caves and in the time it takes to post this comment another 2 "Cave chicks go Rex riding" websites will have been created.
As for TFA, interesting but only just outside the uranium dating error bars and no mention of the error margin in the strike date ~65mya. No mention of a KT boundry at the site that is clearly below the fossils. There is very strong evidence that insects were wiped out across the Americas for over a million years, so I think a bit more extrodinary evidence is required to belive a band of dinosours somehow survived in a "lost valley".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm also intrigued by the fact that these specimens were found in Colorado/New Mexico, which is pretty darn close to the best impact site candidate. I'd expect any animals that survived to be much further away.
I suppose its possible that they migrated there from further away. I wonder if the impact created opportunities for animals further away to move towards the impact site, similar to the way floods can improve the fertility of soil.
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There is very strong evidence that insects were wiped out across the Americas for over a million years, so I think a bit more extrodinary evidence is required to belive a band of dinosours somehow survived in a "lost valley".
More evidence is always good, but once you actually start to think about it, "a small population of some dinosaurs survived in remote areas until it eventually petered out" is actually more plausible than "every single last dinosaur died at once in a gigantic catastrophe that nevertheless was not large enough to affect other animals such as mammals to the same extent".
Many kinds of animals survived, after all. Why shouldn't dinosaurs have, too? I'm certainly not saying they must have, but just on the face of things, it seems more likely that their extinction was gradual and drawn-out over a long period of time. (And yes, I know the K-T extinction is not thought to have happened in the blink of an eye, anyway, but you know what I mean.)
Basically, size. The dinosaurs were all largeish - turkey-sized or bigger - with the exception of thos who seem to have evolved into birds, and may have been much smaller because of the nifty invention of feathers. The only mammals at the time were small, shrew-like animals. It is not unreasonable to think that small beasts could survive, scavenging of the dead big beasts, where big beasts could not.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Holy shit, batman. I thought you were joking. It turns out it was reality tickling my funny-bone.
I especially "like" the quote "Emphasis on scientific evidence supporting: [...]". They're saying up-front "we're here to give you a skewed and biased impression of how the real world works, independent of whether the real world supports our biases".
I can rephrase their bulleted list, too:
"For 45 years(1), we've been spamming the whole world(3), sullying the name of all major sciences(4) and cheating quality control systems(2) in order to convert you to our preconceived notions(6)."
("(n)" refers to the nth bullet)
If they eventually died out because the K-T event drastically changed the environment or the K-T event reduced a species genetic diversity below the point necessary to sustain its population, did that species really survive the K-T event?
If you live through a bomb blast but die 3 days later because of shrapnel in you liver, did you really survive the bomb blast?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Equally, it is a pity that some poorly written papers and a huge amount of media hype has lead to people putting Science in quotation marks when talking about climate change.
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
I wasn't trying to indicate HOW you should teach sex-ed to very young children.
If anything I was making the same point you were trying to make, that lying to them at an early age is a bad idea. (I used the Stork to represent that position in my post.)
The point was to use simple concepts first, then get more complex over time.
I suspect you were flagged as a Troll because you seem to have deliberately missed the point of the post, and snarkily decided that "hugging in a special way" would not be suitable as a first idea for children about where kids come from.
I realise now that in future, all hypothetical examples that I create to illustrate a point, should be accurate, factually based, preferably with all the physics worked out. And of course, meet with your pre-approval.
It's the place where the bones were found that is remarkable, obviously some things survived somewhere on the planet and evolved into birds, humans, etc. However America was closest to the impact and the KT-boundry in N America is preserved in the rock as a layer of tiny glass beads (vaporised sand) that covers the entire continent. The only thing in the American fossil record for a couple of million years after the hit is an abundance of plants and some marine animals.
To find a bunch of dinosaurs that survived what the entire insect population could not, is an extrodinary claim. However I don't think the scientists themselves are explicitly making this claim, I think they are just reporting their evidence and asking "how could this be?".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And they pointed out that lots of frog species seemed to survive pretty easily even though they are very sensitive to acid rain, forest fires and other such things that would have happened if the K-T impact was the primary explanation of extinction.
We know from relatively solid physical evidence what the size and composition of the KT impact object was. We know its effects were world-wide, and we know those effects would have caused acid rain, forest fires, etc.
What we do not know is how the world-wide frog population would have responded to such an event. We don't even know why the frog population is in decline worldwide today.
To hold up the survival of frogs, whose biology is complex and whose interaction with and response to extreme environments is very poorly understood, as a counter-argument against the preponderance of relatively simple physical evidence of world-wide effects from a large impact event is an extremely weak rhetorical move, which looks to me more like misdirection than actual argument.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"Bankrupt" is a funny way of spelling "a great candidate for a bailout".
Do you know what 2 week old dead dinosaur smells like? Maybe they could scavenge for awhile but after that I'm sure the mammals would be too disgusted.
People want to cling to the K/T extinction being a mystery for some reason. It just isn't anymore.
"There appears to have been some mass extinctions around this time. A huge asteroid impact could cause that. Here's evidence of a huge asteroid impact around that time. Case closed."
It seems that in some branches of science, we accept "plausible" as "proven". Sure there may be some pretty good evidence that an asteroid impact caused mass extinctions, but are there any other explanations? Here's a case where someone points out some data inconsistent with the prevalent theory, and we say, "it doesn't NECESSARILY disprove the theory, so we can ignore it". In other branches of science, we would strive for, "we can ABSOLUTELY explain this data", or we'd have to change or qualify the theory.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
The fossil record goes through good and bad patches. Very few people suggests this actually corresponds to real biodiversity. The second-to-last (Campanian) stage of the Late Cretaceous is very good in a lot of places, whereas the stages both earlier (Santonian) and later (Maastrichtian) are not so good. In fact, the Maatstrichtian deposits show more diversity than any pre-Campanian deposit in the Late Cretaceous. What we are probably looking at is a spectacularly good stage for preservation in the Campanian, followed by merely decent one in the Maastrichtian.
"...so why are you afraid to admit that the biblical account of creation and history might be a better way to explain the evidence presented?"
Because we can't confine God to a box in a laboratory, maybe?
Because the Biblical account of creation was disproven 200 years ago. In fact, BOTH Biblical accounts were disproven 200 years ago.