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."

Comments

Cavemen?

[SultanCemil]

So does that mean skimpily clad cavewomen really *did* ride around on dinosaurs? mmmm...

Re:Cavemen?

[TapeCutter]

"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".

Re:Cavemen?

[Anonymous Coward]

not a lost valley, but the Great Valley, noob.

xoxoxo,
Littlefoot

Re:Cavemen?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Cavemen?

[meyekul]

The irony is as soon as they step out of the valley, they drop their eye glasses and shatter them on the rocks.

Re:Cavemen?

[AlecC]

Many kinds of animals survived, after all. Why shouldn't dinosaurs have, too?

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.

Re:Cavemen?

[JustOK]

Yup! Yup! Yup!

Re:Cavemen?

[JustOK]

The amphibians were going to gain control, but when the reptilians attacked, all the frogs surrendered.

Re:Cavemen?

[nephridium]

So does that mean skimpily clad cavewomen really *did* ride around on dinosaurs? mmmm...

Not really. It says they made it to the "Paleocene", i.e. the epoch adjacent to the Cretaceous. To have meet any cavemen they'd have had to survive through the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene all the way to the Pleistocene era. That would still be around 60 million years.

I also highly doubt cavemen (or cavewomen for that matter) had the skill or technology to time travel back to the Paleocene. Afaik only genetically enhanced laboratory mice can do that.

Re:Cavemen?

[Rip Dick]

but... there was time now...

Re:Cavemen?

[camperdave]

To have meet any cavemen they'd have had to survive through the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene all the way to the Pleistocene era.

So what you're saying is that they didn't make the 'cene.

Re:Cavemen?

[TapeCutter]

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?".

Re:Cavemen?

[gtall]

Bingo, just to fix the time line a bit, humans were thought to have split from apes roughly 6-7 million years ago...except for some valued coworkers here.

Re:Cavemen?

[BigBlueOx]

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.

Well, it seems from the latest I've read on these things that paleontologists are now a-thinkin that a lot of the big dinosaurs had feathers too. In fact one article I read said that it was quite possible that T-Rex himself looked "like a big chick".

I remember that article because the image of a 60 foot high "chick" with fluffy baby-feathers coated with the rotting blood and entrails of its victims and flesh-caked teeth the size of stalactites is one that haunts my dreams to this day.

Oh. You want cites? Ah.

Look! A bunny! Look at the bunny! (runs away)

Re:Cavemen?

[D Ninja]

Haha, I definitely did not think I would ever see a Ducky reference on Slashdot. Ahhh...the first movie I ever remember seeing in a movie theater. Had the toys and everything. Those were the days.

Re:Cavemen?

[IndustrialComplex]

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.

You obviously haven't met my dog.

I submit as evidence:
1 dog owned by IndustrialComplex
1 cat litterbox also owned by IndustrialComplex

Conclusion:
IndustrialComplex is disgusted.

Re:Cavemen?

[IndustrialComplex]

I also highly doubt cavemen (or cavewomen for that matter) had the skill or technology to time travel back to the Paleocene. Afaik only genetically enhanced laboratory mice can do that.

The Neanderthals did.

However, they decided that it was easier to use their time machines to go back in time and settle on a continent which is now Antarctica. They built cities underground so that they could avoid disturbing their own ancestors as they continued to develop. Just when the asteroid that wiped out the Dinosaurs was about to hit, they used their now 500 million year advanced technology to leave this planet.

A few come back from time to time to play pratical jokes on their cousins. Kind of like becoming fantastically wealthy and heading back to your HS reunion.

Re:Cavemen?

[flyingsquid]

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.)

It's a bit telling that the study is published in an obscure web-only paleontology journal called "Palaeontologica Electronica". I'm not saying that good work can't be published in obscure journals, but I would argue that if you had really strong evidence for post-Cretaceous dinosaurs, you wouldn't publish it in a journal that nobody's ever heard of. You'd be publishing in Nature, Science, or PNAS. That suggests that he published here because he didn't have a lot of options, because the scientific community was pretty unreceptive to evidence presented in this study. Obviously, the conventional wisdom isn't everything. Geologists hated the idea of continental drift, and the asteroid impact hypothesis got a very cold reception before the Chicxulub crater was found. But it's worth asking whether the evidence here is any good or not.

First off, it's not as if they've suddenly discovered dinosaurs where nobody expected them. Paleontologists have known for decades that these rock beds contain dinosaurs (as well as typical Cretaceous mammals). It's just that everyone else has always interpreted these rocks as being of Cretaceous age, rather than post-Cretaceous. What he's doing is arguing that the rocks are older than we thought.

Second, what's his evidence for saying these are post-Cretaceous rocks? The best evidence would be a marker bed- if you could show that a skeleton lay above the iridium layer formed by the fallout of the asteroid, then it would be pretty much unrefutable. However, the iridium layer has *not* been recognized in this area. The second best evidence would be a layer of volcanic ash which can be dated using radioactive dating. There are no ashes under the bones which are younger than 65.5 million years old (the date of the impact). In fact all the ashes under the bones are around 75-73 million years old. So his evidence is the pollen grains. He says they look like post-Cretaceous pollen, not Cretaceous pollen. That doesn't seem terribly convincing in my mind. Given that the mammals seen in the same rocks are pretty clearly Cretaceous type mammals, the fossil evidence is contradictory here. His other evidence is something called magnetostratigraphy- the Earth's magnetic poles reverse every few hundred thousand or million years, with series of normal and reversed polarities. If you can match up a series of polarity changes, you can *sometimes* figure out how old the rocks are. But it's not a very precise method, and it's a bit tricky to figure out where a particular sequence going "normal-reversed-normal-reversed" fits into the geological record. It's a bit like trying to figure out the time and date by whether your neighbor has his house lights on or off, or whether the trash has been picked up recently or not.

In short, it would take a lot more than this one paper to overturn the consensus that has resulted from one hundred years of scientific research. I mean, if someone published an experiment tomorrow saying that Einstein was wrong, what would your reaction be? To reject Einstein? Or to think that the experimenter might have screwed up? Currently, the bulk of the evidence says that the extinction took place 65.5 million years ago, and that (with the exception of birds) the dinosaurs didn't make it.

Re:Cavemen?

[spiralofhope]

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 then...

Science isn't based on opinions like "more plausible then [sic]".

... 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".

The physical evidence and thereafter the calculated energy of an entry (atmosphere alone) indicate that the global air temperature was raised to the flash point of living wood and that all the forests of the world were set on fire.

The result is the death of the bulk of above-surface land plant life.

Then the earth cooled for various reasons, starting with light reflection off of the smoke.

Dinosaurs died out because they have no internal way to heat themselves up. Mammals do.

Dinosaurs died out because they need to eat big creatures. Mammals don't.

Mammals had an edge because of some sulphur-resistance mutations which survive even today.

Don't think for a second that mammals didn't suffer. As I understand, mammals may have been down to as few as SEVEN SPECIES after that catastrophe.

Re:Cavemen?

[jbengt]

Cats have very inefficient digestive systems, and, ignoring the possibility of parasites, the sad fact is that there's probably more nutrition, protein especially, in cat feces than in many commercial dog foods.
Still disgusting, though.

Re:Cavemen?

[Patch86]

For the cat faeces to be more nutritious than dog food, cat food would have to be significantly more nutritious again.

Have you any idea exactly how much ash there is in cat food...?

Re:Cavemen?

[Patch86]

Oh. You want cites? Ah.

Look! A bunny! Look at the bunny! (runs away)

Oh come one, that's not even trying...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#Skin_and_feathers

Re:Cavemen?

[StarkRG]

Insects are easier to kill than dinosaurs. Or, so I assume as I've never actually tried to kill a dinosaur by smacking it with a newspaper.

I keep dinosaurs in my garden

[GordonCopestake]

only I call them "chickens".

Re:I keep dinosaurs in my garden

[maxume]

Does it make them angry?

Re:I keep dinosaurs in my garden

[Junior J. Junior III]

only I call them "chickens".

Tyrannosaurus Clux

Yes....of course...

[Corporate Troll]

They're called "birds".... Duh! ;-)

Still with us

[Smivs]

They are still with us, working for some IT departments. Have you never seen an IEsixosaurus?

Re:Still with us

[Anonymous Coward]

no, but I've seen a one-eyed dinosaur-- doyathinkhesaurus

Re:Still with us

[RuBLed]

MOZIRRAAA!!!

Re:Still with us

[Hogwash McFly]

No, but there's a machine in the sever room capable of Tri-teraflops.

Other findings.

[Mr2cents]

Just a day ago, I read another article claiming that the impact predates the extinction event by 300000 years. The last thing hasn't been said about the dinosaurs, that's for sure. I really like the way David Polly puts it in the article (the one linked to by /.): "Finding conclusive evidence, however, is a difficult matter when the crime scene is 65 million years old".

Re:Other findings.

[Burnhard]

I wrote a paper on this many years ago, concluding that the KT event caused extinctions in species already in decline. For example, the Ammonoidea were becoming less numerous for ten million years before the impact. But previous posters are quite correct, the Dinosaurs are survived by Birds!

Re:Other findings.

[Shrike82]

I'm confused. Is that larger or smaller than a metric fuckload of evidence?

Re:Other findings.

[nyctopterus]

The problem with the "already in decline" arguments is that there are statistical effects that make sudden extinctions look gradual. This has pretty much been demonstrated to be the case for Late Cretaceous dinosaurs (I don't know about ammonites).

People want to cling to the K/T extinction being a mystery for some reason. It just isn't anymore. If you want a good mystery, the Permian-Triassic extinction event is bigger, and still (relatively) unexplained.

Re:Other findings.

[jellomizer]

Unfortunatly a lot of people don't like that idea. Not because of the science but because it puts us an other chip down. So most people are willing to accept evolution, but they take comfort their ancestors who resembled mice were in some way so much more superior then those giant monsters, and could survive a mass extinction while those huge monsters couldn't. We are just getting to the point where we can grasp that some dinosaurs evolved into birds, however we kinda are wishing they were more birdlike before the mass extinction.

Re:Other findings.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

That's not the whole argument.

The show I saw pointed out that there were fewer and fewer fossils being found the closer they get to K-T event. The claim was that there are twice as many known fossils 5-6 million years before than there are 2-3 million years before. I don't know if your suggested statistical side effect explains that.

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.

Re:Other findings.

[radtea]

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.

Re:Other findings.

[Bob-taro]

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.

Re:Other findings.

[nyctopterus]

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.

Re:Other findings.

[nyctopterus]

Sorry, but it really seems like you're talking out of your arse. You do not prove things in any science, you come up with falsifiable theories, and test them out. The more falsifiable the better. It is also clear that you are not at all familiar with the research in the area. The bolide impact theory has a lot of interface with the data, and is immensely falsifiable. It has enormous explanatory power, and is not at this moment falsified by any data.

Could it be wrong? Sure it could! But coming up with little pet theories about what "killed the dinosaurs" is not going to cut it, and neither are tired and refuted arguments like the one above.

These arguments are trashed out in the literature, you just have to look at it.

Re:Other findings.

[wastedlife]

At the moment, the King's edict is that the imperial fuckload is larger. However, a metric shit-tonne remains larger still. You could pour 4,516 gill of treacle into a barrel and it would only weigh about half a shit-tonne.

Re:Other findings.

[wastedlife]

How many cubic handbreadths of dark ale equals one arse-load again? I have 68 furlongs to drive home and I need to know how much Guinness to bring. I know I can drink about a third of an arse-load in 26 furlongs, but the stupid store here sells by the cubic handbreadth and my phone does not have the proper conversion tools. Damn technology does everything in the world as long as it isn't useful.

But of course

[DynaSoar]

"some dinosaurs survived the extinction event(s)"

If some dinosaurs hadn't survived it/them, we wouldn't have birds.

Re:But of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yo moma comes to mind

Re:But of course

[Tony Hoyle]

That's what gets taught in schools unfortunately.. especially the 'decided to evolve' bit, like a dinosaur woke up one day and thought it would grow some feathers for a change. Many people retain this view through adulthood.

Ever heard the whole silly 'a cow fell into the sea and became a whale' idea? Straight out of school textbooks.. I can remember being taught it myself.

The problem education makes is it dumbs things down for children then ignores the issue when they grow up - then some nutjob comes along, points out how silly the version they understand is therefore 'evolution' must be wrong, and we get the whole debate starting again. Maybe teaching 8 year olds about random genetic mutation might be a bit much, but by the time they are 15 they should be able to handle it.

Re:But of course

[VShael]

Yeah, evolution should be taught like evolution.

Simple concepts first, when they are young.
More complex concepts later, when they are older.

But definitely, teach them simple concepts.

You don't start sex-ed by teaching them about the Stork bringing children. You tell them that when a mammy and daddy love each other very much, and want to have a baby, they hug in a very special way...

Re:But of course

[drinkypoo]

You tell them that when a mammy and daddy love each other very much, and want to have a baby, they hug in a very special way...

That's good, start lying to them young. That's really worked out well for us so far.

Re:But of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww crap.

What am I going to do with these 35 Anal bead sets and ball gags? I was supposed to teach 3rd grade Sex ed this week...

Dammit! Let me guess, you're going to tell me that scat and explaining the dirty sanchez is out as well..

Damn you Conservatives!

Re:But of course

[Anonymous Coward]

well, "hug in a very special way..." sounds much better than "What didn't get shot into mommy's face became you" or "You are what didn't leak out"

Or in your case, "Your daddy was the one who could afford mommy for the whole night"

Re:But of course

[drinkypoo]

Thinking back to my school years, I learnt about Newtonian physics before I learnt about special relativity. Was that wrong? Certainly not.

Well, sticking with the example at hand; Newtonian physics work in every case the average person will ever encounter. But telling children a "special hug" can result in children can only cause confusion. Next thing you know they'll be afraid to hug their hairy-nosed uncle. While the person who constructed the example has attempted to defend his poorly-chosen example it is a particularly excellent example of the kind of thing we're talking about here, so I'm going to stick with it. Besides, I don't believe him anyway.

Oversimplifying things for children is fine. Just don't tell them things that are outright *false* (such as the stork in the above example);

The hug is no less false than the stork. You don't even have to be face to face to make a baby. You (and the OP) are attempting to create a distinction between falsehoods which does not exist, which was the very point of my comment to begin with. He accuses me of missing the point in his comment; it is clear that you both have missed the point of mine.

and also, once they reach a certain age, make sure they understand that they ARE getting an oversimplification and why.

Yes, I agree. That age is birth. More literally, when they are old enough to be asking you questions, they are old enough to be told that they are being given enough information for the time being. If you are not going to tell them the truth, then certainly you should be telling them that you are not telling them the truth.

I don't know what age you think is a good time to stop lying to children, but please allow me to assure you that they are living, thinking creatures even before they can really understand the repercussions of childbirth (you know, sometime around the age of 30 or 40 is when that usually happens — if ever) and if you lie to them you will only hold them back.

Now, I'm not talking about stuff like Santa Claus or Jesus — that's a separate diatribe. I'm talking about real questions with real answers. This is one of those cases. If you're so afraid to tell your children what genitals are for that you have to lie to them about where babies come from, you've probably got some serious fucking problems ahead of you. And speaking of which, have you noticed that teen pregnancy is on the rise in the USA?

Surprising?

[TFer_Atvar]

After reading the abstract, it sounds very interesting. I do have one big question: Do the remains show any difference from similar specimens prior to the K-T boundary? When you have small, isolated populations, you tend to get rapid evolution to suit the species to that specific area. If this small group of animals survived in an isolated fashion, I'd expect some sort of physiological drift from the mainline in order to compensate for their unique area.

If they don't show much difference, I have to wonder what, if anything, this says about the K-T event itself; whether it created a long-term climatological change in addition to a catastrophic change evidenced by the K-T geologic boundary. 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.

Re:Surprising?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Surprising?

[smoker2]

The K-T boundary is not a simple line defining before and after. It is a phenomenon that took place over time - the estimated occurrence of the event was 65.5 (+||- 0.3)Ma. That is a 600,000 year margin, and when you consider that the earliest human species (read as - only just not monkeys) were at the most 2 million years old, it is not unreasonable to theorise that the causative event did not represent a definite cut off point for any species. Things can change a lot in 600K years. And it is also a dangerous habit to take estimated figures and then apply them to suit your own hypothesis too rigorously. Chinese whispers and all that. As somebody else posted further up, it would be more of a surprise to NOT find specimens outside of the accepted period.

You don't have to be so insulting!!

[rts008]

Yes, some of us did survive the "alleged 'K-T' Extinction"! And your suppositions bring us *much* hilarity.

Our day has come!
Oh, yes...try and laugh, humans; But in bitterness you shall weep!

We have usurped your world's economy with 'Flintstone's Vitamins'!
Be prepared to bow down to your new Tasty Dinosaur Overlords!

signed, Dino.
*sees Fat Freddie, and runs for driveway* "Yaap!1 Yip! Yappy-kiyay, motherfscker!"-fires AT-4 against Fred-n-Barney*

Re:You don't have to be so insulting!!

[Mr2cents]

Everyone who reads Dilbert already knows this. They're hiding behind the couch.

cautionary notes from a paleo geek

[Dr_Snugglebunny]

2 points to be aware of: 1. The journal this is published in is not held in high esteem by most paleontologists. This may be telling; I imagine the paper was rejected by several other journals before ending up here. Peer review seems a little light at PE. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but calls for caution. 2. Everything hangs on the authors' interpretation of the age of the sediments; the bones don't seem reworked (i.e. moved around from older sediments), which is one source of error, but he could be wrong with the radiometric age estimation, which even in the best cases has a moderate margin of error. BUT it remains an interesting question of any dinosaurs survived long past the extinction; most of our picture of the K-T event comes from central/western North America, so who knows what happened elsewhere.

Re:cautionary notes from a paleo geek

[laughing_badger]

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.

They survived because of God...

[VinylRecords]

I mean geez people haven't you been keeping up with the latest issues of Creationism Quarterly!
This stuff is "Peer-reviewed by degreed scientists" it says so right on the website!
It has "Scholarly articles representing the major scientific disciplines" scientific disciplines like: biology, chemistry, theology, creationism! Duh!
"Emphasis on scientific evidence supporting: intelligent design, a recent creation, and a catastrophic worldwide flood"!

http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq.html /sarcasmbrainmelting

Maybe.

[denzacar]

Jesus sure did.

Re:Obvious solution...

[BabyDave]

"Tyranno-saur-us, but did anyone ... [puts on shades] ... see them?"

[The Who] Bwaaaaaaaaoooo ba ba! (etc)

Re:Obvious solution...

[VShael]

You know when he takes his glasses off, and looks to the side? He's reading cue cards. Watch for it.

It's obvious once you're aware of it.

Abybody who knows CowboyNeal...

[Chrisq]

Some Large Dinosaurs Survived the K-T Extinction

Abybody who knows CowboyNeal would see this as old news

metastable climate

[dltaylor]

It continues to dismay me how many really don't get it. The impact, or impact+major vulcanism (BTW, what order were those in, and could the impact have pinged the earth hard enough to initiate a major volcanic event at whatever the interval?), didn't kill the dinosaurs by direct effect. They didn't all die in a week or a month, or, even a few decades, centuries, or millennia, most likely.

What happened was a significant enough change in climate in nearly all habitats, over a short enough period of time, that the vast majority of major fauna, particularly dinosaurs, and a lot of the flora simply could not adapt to the new conditions, nor migrate to a location that suited them (nor build bubble cities in which to weather the change). If the birth/death ratio slips below 1 long enough the species is extinct. If it is only slightly less than 1 because the available nutrition is not quite good enough, or there's enough hard dust around to reduce lung efficiency, or the temperatures don't allow eggs to brood quite as well, or some such, then it can take a VERY long time to kill off populations in the tens of millions. Small regions of "better", if not quite "good enough", might easily sustain a very slowly declining ecosystem for hundreds of millennia.

Bottom line, though, is that there are a LOT of dinosaur fossils below the iridium-enriched layer and VERY few, and those not for very long, above it.

Shift in the Earth's rotation?

[erroneus]

A few days back, the [god-damned-mother-frikken] History Channel did several hours on predictions of the future and more specifically, December 12, 2012 and I got sucked right into it. By the time their series finished for the night, I was wrecked inside with this horrible feeling of doom. (They put together these very compelling presentations with pictures and music...really sets a dramatic mood! and when you are staying up too late... well even the most resistant people can fall victim I think.)

In any case, the most interesting theory surrounding the projected end of the world day is that the rotational axis of the earth will change resulting in massive geologic events. What's more, they suggested that the earth had gone through this kind of change before and was a potential cause of the mass extinction events in the past.

I don't claim to know much about all that, but I have to remind myself that this was the FIRST time I had heard about rotational axis shifting (but not the first time I had heard of magnetic polar shifting) and definitely the first time I had heard of rotational axis shifting being cited as the cause of mass extinction events.

Who knows more about this than I do? Got anything to debunk or verify what I recall from late-night TV watching?

Re:Creationists like this piece of news...

[drinkypoo]

If they actually read the entire book they wouldn't get so obsessed with timescales.

You're assuming that they are mentally equipped to deal with the inherent contradictions, some of which are deliberate and in fact whole books of the christian bible consist of apologia/revision of older books. You can't treat the Bible like a manual, and that's the mistake that too many make. No amount of reading or rereading will help if they can't get over this one simple issue.

Re:Fossil records cannot be show extinction dates

[nyctopterus]

That would be true if the sample is small (which to a certain extent it is). We will never "prove" (proof is for mathematicians) that a bunch of things went extinct on a certain date, but we can built a compelling statistical likelihood.

Even more in middle management

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of dinosaurs hiding out in Corporate America's middle management layers. A few make it to upper management or to the executive suites.

Q: What do you call a company with too many dinosaurs in the executive suites?
A: Bankrupt. *cue rim-shot*

Re:Even more in middle management

[pjt33]

"Bankrupt" is a funny way of spelling "a great candidate for a bailout".

Quantum Mechanics...

[Shivinski]

As with most articles lately, it'll probably emerge that quantum mechanics is behind the survival of these select few dinosaurs.

Re:Quantum Mechanics...

[Qzukk]

it'll probably emerge that quantum mechanics is behind the survival of these select few dinosaurs.

Quantum Mechanics can't save the dinosaurs. For a job this big, we need String Theory.

I think you meme... err, mean...

[jonaskoelker]

in the time it takes to post this comment another 2 "Cave chicks go Rex riding" websites will have been created.

I think you mean "2 Girls 1 Rex"

Some things are just untouchable by parody...

[jonaskoelker]

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)

Wait a second...

[DrWho520]

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?

Re:Wait a second...

[immakiku]

No but if you eventually produced children and they eventually produced children before your liver kicked it from shrapnel, then you survived it.

Re:not a troll

[VShael]

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.

Re:So was anyone else...

[koiransuklaa]

That's a new mount option, right? I'll start using that right away, I don't want my filesystems wasting time updating those shark stamps on my files.

Damn Time Travelers, & circular time travel lo

[jameskojiro]

Here is the theory,

Scientists in the 1980's Wondered why no Dinosaurs after 65 MYA, so they found the K-T event impact crater and assumed it was the event that killed off all of the Dinosaurs.

So later in 2040's when we invent Time Travel, people of course want to go back and see the dinosaurs, so they all go back to the day before the K-T impact and watch the dinosaurs and they figure, hey since they will be relatively extinct tomorrow then why not shoot them and take a few trophy's back with them, plus they are good eatin'....

So by the next day when the Asteroid impacts the Earth most all of the dinosaurs have been hunted to extinction in one day from all of those time travelers going back to the same day before the Asteroid. A few pockets of Dinosaurs Survived the massive hunt because the time travel machines don't work quite right in some areas of on the earth due to magnetite deposits in certain areas. Those few dinos that survived the day before massive hunt and the Asteroid impact didn't have enough genetic diversity to survive and thus died off a little after 65 MYA.

So we killed off the Dinosaurs to make true the extinction we have always had in our fossil record.

The good news is that besides hunting they took some live Dinosaurs forward to the 2040's and they are being bred to replace chicken which have gone extinct due to the avian flu.