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New "Last Dinosaur" Find Backs Asteroid Extinction
An anonymous reader writes "A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact, and did not go extinct gradually due to climate change or changes in sea level, as previous theories have proposed."
They were killed by all of the cavemen for food.
At least that's what my science teacher told me.
- A Student from Kansas
What sort of deposit was the horn found in? If there were enough water, isn't it possible that the horn could have been displaced and thus ended up in younger sediments? My university coursebook says that that is oft to occur with dinosaur teeth; could similar happen with a dinosaur's horn?
...I assert that dinosaurs did not growl or make any other scary sounds...they mooed.
Hebrews 11:8
Jeremiah 33:3
Good news: the Scientific Method is still alive.
The bad news: This pretty much disproves my hypothesis of Sauroflatulogenic Climate Change.
I can see the fnords!
Because that was my favorite totally rad "Last Dinosaur".
Obligatory Denver!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0aTPc66lfk
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Creepy concidence hre. I had just finished wathing "National Geographic Explorer: 24 Hours After Asteroid Impact" documentary seconds ago when I loaded slashdot to see this story. I recommend that documentary btw; it really dwarfed all my previous imagination of what might have occured...
"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity" - Machine Beauty
Dinosaurs became extinct because they had laser eyes and they killed each other. No one has yet been able to disprove this theory.
https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19135208295
As I recall, all the dinosaurs were killed by a gigantic Brain in an attempt to memorize everything about the universe and then destroy it.
The margin of error on when the last dinosaurs were existent and the margin of error on when the K-T boundary was deposited are both hundreds of thousands of years.
In some places there are at least 300,000 years of sediment between the fossil evidence of the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event and the K-T boundary.
K-T boundary has is dated to (65.5 ± 0.3) Ma, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event is dated to 65.5 Ma, so the impact could have been the day the last dinosaurs were alive, it could have been 300,000 years before, 11 years after, or 213,417 years after.
They couldn't find any dinosaur bones within 3 meters of the boundary, then they found one 13 cm below the boundary, and they still claim the asteroid extincted them?
I want to see a bunch of bones lying on the boundary. Contemporaneous with the event. Show that the effect [extinction of dinosaurs] comes after the cause [asteroid that created the K-T boundary]. Until you can do that, you can't even associate the asteroid with the extinction. Even at 13 cm, they're not at all well-correlated.
They were killed by all of the cavemen for food.
Mine taught us that they were ridden to death.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We collected rock samples above and below the horn to determine the exact placement of the K/T boundary, and were surprised to see that the horn was no more than 13 cm below it.
A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact
Speaking as a guy living in a county where the only non-service blue collar jobs left are at the local rock quarry, and having a geologist as a roommate two decades ago, I speak with profound scientific authority that those two quotes only go together if you define "right up until" as being about one zillion years. I suspect most readers define "right up until" on a somewhat shorter scale, like the time difference between the local news and american-idle, not zillions of years. (waves rolled up newspaper) Naughty journalist! Naughty!
"right up until" 13 cm of rock.
I am completely unaware of any political or cultural reason for the authors to be blind to this problem. I have no dog in the fight that I'm aware of. Just saying 13 cm of rock is not "right up until"
It MIGHT be that the real story is on a "bones per cm" basis this raises the curve implying the rate does not "tail off" (get it? dinosaur tail?) until the boundary, but that's not how the journalists are reporting it, as if the tip of the fossil was touching the boundary or chemical analysis of the fossil shows the dinosaur died during the boundary event.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The thing that I always wondered about with the asteroid impact theory is that we have several species of large reptiles that survived the extinction event. While I'm no scientist, I'm wondering if there might not have been some form of communicable disease that was stressing the dinosaur population beforehand that accounts for the gradual diminishing of fossils in the record and the asteroid impact might have been a coup de grace. I find it hard to imagine that sea turtles and crocadillians would survive while various marine reptiles did not -- moasaurs, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, etc. I suppose there will be no easy answers.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
...I assert that dinosaurs did not growl or make any other scary sounds...they mooed.
"Mooing" isn't actually far off the mark, given videos like this and this. One might imagine that this antediluvian bird (pictured: a modern reconstruction of the raptor Deinonychus) might have made similar sounds.
It sounds like some people are really jumping to conclusions here. While finding a fossil from the time of the asteroid impact does indicate all dinosaurs hadn't died out before then, it doesn't mean they weren't gradually dying out due to environmental changes.
Someone dying when a rock fell on his head isn't proof he wasn't wasting away from a terminal disease.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I have a living alligator here that would like to argue with that "last dinosaur" designation.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
One would think that the upheavals of the extinction event would have created some mass graveyards that could be found at the layer itself. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, the one wiped out generation is a statistical blip relative to the millions of generations that came and went through the normal lives and deaths, but given the scale of the disruption to normal ecology, it would be nice to find boneyards right on the KT boundary event itself.
Dinosaurs could not have died from climate change. They didn't have SUVs.
Stupid heads.
I always take such finds with a grain of salt. Especially when there are a number of theories that are competing with it. First off there is a large margin of error in the K-T boundary. Second it was an asteroid may have *GASP* moved a lot of dirt, and possibly brought things closer to the surface.
That's because mister "We need a public option", Liberman, suddenly changed his mind and made sure there wasn't one.
K-T boundary has is dated to (65.5 ± 0.3) Ma, the Cretaceousâ"Tertiary extinction event is dated to 65.5 Ma, so the impact could have been the day the last dinosaurs were alive, it could have been 300,000 years before, 11 years after, or 213,417 years after.
You are assuming both calculations are independent, but they may not be. The asteroid collision threw up a lot of chemicals which characterize well the asteroid collision, among them an abundance of iridium.
You don't need to calculate the date exactly, if a fossil is in this iridium rich layer you can assume it died on the asteroid impact, that is both events happened on the same date even if you don't know exactly which date it was.
Like any catastrophic event, a chain of events leads up to a final point of failure. The straw that broke the camel's back, as it were (at most). Almost never does one factor result in the collapse of an entire system.
Another idea to chew on: before or around most large extinction events, there is a period of heavy mountain building. MOUNTAINS KILLED DINOSAURS. AFAIK the main case for the asteroid impact theory is that there are diamonds with a particular structure and lots of iridium found in layers around the extinction, suggesting that there was an extraterrestrial impact (because iridium is rare in the Earth's crust, and diamond particulates of that composition are also rare).
But both can be found in the lower layers of the Earth. Volcanoes are known for blowing crap from lower layers onto the crust. The Deccan Traps were very active around this time period, spewing heavy elements into the air. A long and protracted period of volcanism and resulting environmental changes is a much more sound explanation for the phenomena.
Of course, the biggest piece of evidence that dinosaurs weren't killed by asteroids is the fact that not all dinosaurs are extinct.
The clincher will be when they find the dinosaur fossil with a big lump on its head from where the asteroid hit. Just kidding, I'm actually pretty much convinced of this already.
Typical assholes. You can't be black or gay here. You get mooded down by the hyper elit global warmining believing jerks. I go from great karma to terrible karma in 2 hours for posting a comment questioning global warming. You will probably get the same treatment by the mods for being a gay nigger. Sorry. I feel your pain.
What a load of bollocks, when the subject comes up, you get at least as many "AGW is an evil conspiracy by liberals to stop us driving our cars and owning assault rifles" posts as ones by "hyper elit global warmining believing jerks".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
After having listened to those enlightened "Intelligent Design" proponents, I was informed that dinosaurs are really just part of a conspiracy plot by those pesky "Evolution" theorists whose sole purpose is to steal your soul for Satan.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
I've heard and read many times, since years and years ago already, that dinosaurs went instinct due to an asteroid impact.
And now a news article is saying dinosaurs went instinct due to an asteroid impact?
Large creatures were pushed to extinction when the oxygen dropped sufficating them. Look at the HUGE dragonflies - they could NOT survive at current oxygen levels - physically impossible for them to get enough with the respiration system they had/have - same thing with the large creatures of the day, and the smaller ones adapted to that level of air mix - and when it changed quickly, they could not adapt and died. Smaller creatures survived, and later adapted/grew somewhat larger when the positions in the vacated biosphere were available - but nothing as large as before on massive scales.
SO the question remains - what was the cause of the oxygen/co2 mix change - lots of plants die with less sunshine causing FURTHER depletion when they start to decay. Now the question is simply what was the cause of the plant deaths NOT the animal deaths - that animal death is simply a tertiary effect.