Scientists Say The Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Almost Wiped Us Out Too (theweek.com)

HughPickens.com writes: Conventional wisdom states that mammalian diversity emerged from the ashes of the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction event, ultimately giving rise to our own humble species. But Joshua A. Krisch writes at This Week that the asteroid that decimated the dinosaurs also wiped out roughly 93 percent of all mammalian species. "Because mammals did so well after the extinction, we have tended to assume that it didn't hit them as hard," says Nick Longrich. "However our analysis shows that the mammals were hit harder than most groups of animals, such as lizards, turtles, crocodilians, but they proved to be far more adaptable in the aftermath." Mammals survived, multiplied, and ultimately gave rise to human beings. So what was the great secret that our possum-like ancestors knew that dinosaurs did not? One answer is that early mammals were small enough to survive on insects and dying plants, while large dinosaurs and reptiles required a vast diet of leafy greens and healthy prey that simply weren't available in the lean years, post-impact. So brontosauruses starved to death while prehistoric possums filled their far smaller and less discerning bellies. "Even if large herbivorous dinosaurs had managed to survive the initial meteor strike, they would have had nothing to eat," says Russ Graham, "because most of the earth's above-ground plant material had been destroyed." Other studies have suggested that mammals survived by burrowing underground or living near the water, where they would have been somewhat shielded from the intense heatwaves, post-impact. Studies also suggest that mammals may have been better spread-out around the globe, and so had the freedom to recover independently and evolve with greater diversity. "After this extinction event, there was an explosion of diversity, and it was driven by having different evolutionary experiments going on simultaneously in different locations," Longrich says. "This may have helped drive the recovery. With so many different species evolving in different directions in different parts of the world, evolution was more likely to stumble across new evolutionary paths."

Comments

Really?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

If you made that assumption, please raise your hand.

Re:Really?

[WarJolt]

I feel like every few years the "scientific community" comes to a consensus on a new dino apocalypse theory. I am, so sick of unlearning all the shit that I learned in high school only to have to relearn it again.

For example, dinosaurs were on their way out before the meteor hit.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/19/...

So was the asteroid really that bad? Honestly, I just don't care anymore. What I do care about is the pseudoscience passed off as facts as if the scientific community is doing more than trying to tell a consistent story based on a minuscule amount of evidence. The sad thing is scientists can't agree on theories when there is a preponderance of evidence. What hope do we have of knowing something that happened to living things millions of years ago. Quit sensationalizing this stuff.

Re:Really?

[RabidReindeer]

Warning: the link WILL start blasting audio through your speakers without prior permission.

I don't get what you're saying. We should just throw up our hands and give up because we can only arrive at an approximation of the truth?

Re:Really?

[Rei]

And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"

Re:Really?

[Wycliffe]

And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"

Avian dinosaurs and mammals have several things in common. They both have some form of covering (fur/feathers), they both have a lot of smaller species, they both have a lot of omnivorous species, and most importantly all mammals and many avian species can regulate their own internal body heat. My guess is that the fur/feathers combined with being warm blooded is what gave mammals/avians the biggest lead. With wildly fluctuating temperatures, being able to self-regulate would be a major advantage. I don't think the immediate heat is the problem. The problem is that if you survive that then the dust has now blocked out the sun and temperatures drop for the next several years. Dinosaurs had evolved for a tropical environment and would have had no way to deal with several years of cold weather. This also explains why most of the reptiles that did survive are aquatic. Water would have helped the aquatic species regulate their body temperatures better.

Re:Really?

[Ol Olsoc]

So was the asteroid really that bad? Honestly, I just don't care anymore. What I do care about is the pseudoscience passed off as facts as if the scientific community is doing more than trying to tell a consistent story based on a minuscule amount of evidence. The sad thing is scientists can't agree on theories when there is a preponderance of evidence. What hope do we have of knowing something that happened to living things millions of years ago. Quit sensationalizing this stuff.

Sounds like you need religion, not science.

I think you crave consistency, and unchanging thought, which religion by it's nature provides.

Regardless, the idea that dinosaurs were on the decline is not contradicting of a meteor strike. It might have been the event that ended dinosaurs as the alpha critters on the planet, but in fact it didn't even completely wipe out the dinosaurs, they are still among us as birds.

This idea that mammals were largely decimated is perfectly consistent with a large asteroid strike as well.

And rather than getting distressed as the pieces of the puzzle are filled in, some of us get in a more celebratory mood as we gain more evidence. The various fields with their individual facts correlating with other disciplines, with geology, physics, paleontology, and often others converging on a likely scenario, and then further research showing the plausibility or lack of plausibility are just plain exciting. Even when wrong, it teaches us which way we don't want to look in the future.

What causes you distress, causes many of us excitement. But it is knowledge versus being certain of something

Which is why I suggest the surety of religion for you, especially of the fundamentalist kind.

Re:Really?

[Ol Olsoc]

According to that link's incredibly obnoxious video, last dinosaurs roamed the land 650 million years BC. They can't even do metric calculations on years!

I fed the dinosaurs in my back yard this morning.

Re:Really?

[Ol Olsoc]

And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"

Exactly. Now the hypothesis that small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and the avian critters survived on dead plants and seeds is very plausible. it's going to be difficult to prove that exactly, but it doesn't take anything magical for the predisposed and lucky to survive on what they might have eaten anyway, while the earth regenerated from the same seeds. I see the squirrels, chipmunks and birds doing that in the backyard every day, and anyone seeing a gorgeous pileated woodpecker will get the bird/dinosaur connection immediately.

Which brings to mind the paleontological issue I'm more interested in lately - that many dinosaurs were feathered. I'm fascinated by the possibility that rather than ugly leatherbags, that dinosurs might hve been colorful feathered megabirds in appearance.

Re:Really?

[Rei]

Indeed. Think of the massive amount of organic matter in the Cretaceous hothouse environment before the K-Pg impact. Even with all of the wildfires, there would have been a truly massive amount of it left. And thus detrivores and decomposers. And thus things who eat those things, and things who eat those. There was no shortage of food overall - just a radically, radically altered environment, with vastly reduced populations. I actually find it more amazing that plants made it than that animals did.

Speaking of birds/dinosaurs... it's not just only about appearances - picture their behaviors too. For example, parrots often have something called "eye pinning" in their threat displays. In rapid, jerky movements they lean their head down, back up, tail flayed out like a fan showing their bright colors, and stare down their targets. Their pupils pulsate in size - big, small, big, small, every 1-3 seconds. A beating black circle in an angry orange eye. Now picture that sort of threat display on something as big as, say, a T-rex. Can you think of anything more terrifying than that? Meanwhile a parrot may switch between holding perfectly still, and suddenly randomly snapping at anything, literally anything in range - clamping down on a stick, a toy, a steel bar, whatever, as hard as it possibly can, while staring at you with its pulsing eyes, as if to say, "THIS IS GONNA BE YOU NEXT!". Now again, imagine something the size of a T-rex, doing that display, snapping at whole tree trunks while pulsing its eyes at you.

Birds are also famous for having complex, diverse calls. The reason for this is that they have a syrinx rather than a larynx for making vocalizations. It's based around vibrating the walls rather than cords; the walls are divided and varied in tension, so they can impart multiple tones at the same time. Many of their ancestors probably had similar abilities. So expect complex "dinosaur song", or at least theropod song.

Re:Really?

[Matheus]

Personally I'm making the assumption that our genetic ancestors survived by eating all of the species who didn't. Even a meat eating dinosaur would need a LOT of meat at its disposal BUT a small mammal can live for a long time on the meat of a single massive dino. The conditions post-impact might even be just about perfect to naturally preserve them.. ?

Get out the smoker, honey! We're making dino-jerky!!!

Re:Really?

[bingoUV]

Which brings to mind the paleontological issue I'm more interested in lately - that many dinosaurs were feathered. I'm fascinated by the possibility that rather than ugly leatherbags, that dinosurs might hve been colorful feathered megabirds in appearance.

Yeah, unfortunately there isn't much evidence of primary colours like red and blue. Most evidence is of brown and grey - though very little is known about colours. And osteoderms would have dampened the soft-toy appearance.

But many of their babies have been proven to be cute, so there you are.

Re:Really?

[Dread_ed]

Religion, at its foundation, is about the experience of humanity. And, in as much as humans are the same as they always have been, the lessons of religions are immutably valid.

Religions even speak narratives today, fraught with meaning concerning large groups of people. I hope the lessons learned from the growth of religions to their current proportions can find their way into our lexicons of knowledge for future generations, much as religious texts did for early mankind. That said, our chroniclers are no longer the shaman and elders they once were, and their analogous oral histories and manuscripts have been replaced by peer reviewed papers and investigative journalism.

For the well read it is easy to see how the shift from inherited wisdom to procedural knowledge has also resulted in a shift from broad strokes to incredibly detailed minutiae. I long for an updated text, encompassing truth for the ages, designed to be passed to future generations, but developed by a modern mindset and devoid of the pitfalls of some of the current religions. Were I to have the honor I would call it "A handbook for those that walk with humans."

Re:Really?

[malditaenvidia]

Yeah, remember when dinosaurs were these awesome lizard-like creatures? Now they're these fruitcake feather-wielding assholes and my dinosaur toys are scientifically inaccurate. What a time to be alive.

Re:Really?

[Rei]

Please don't confuse science with media coverage of science.

Re:Really?

[ceoyoyo]

Sure, humans never change and religion is immutably valid. We still definitely abhor tattoos and can all agree that slaves are fine, so long as they're collected according to a few simple rules.

Re:Really?

[ceoyoyo]

I remember when dinosaurs were clunky lizards that were long extinct. Now there are a couple of them yelling at each other outside my window. I like it better this way.

Re:Really?

[Rei]

Well, at least the theropods are birdlike. The further you get toward the stegosaurus end of the dinosaur spectrum the closer you'll get to crocodilians (crocodilians are not descendants of dinosaurs but they're very close; their common ancestor isn't even as far back as the common ancestor between dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

The amazing thing to me is it's starting to look more and more like, in the right conditions, you can actually recover soft tissue from dinosaurs, even sequence proteins. There was some skepticism early on (arguing contamination and the like), but today the consensus seems to be they actually are what they appear to be: actual dinosaur soft tissue.

Previously, our best bet for "recreating dinosaurs" has been:

1) to start by contrasting bird genomes with other branches close to dinosaurs, like crocodilians, to reverse engineer as much of a generic "dinosaur genome" as possible (getting rid of as many of the avian changes that occurred in the past 65M+ years as we can)
2) For the rest, as much as you can, activate / deactivate genes that are already present in living species that are responsible for desired morphological features that may well have been active/inactive in the past
3) Where otherwise necessary, use custom insertions/ modification to recreate morphological features that we no longer have a trace of.

It's something... but not perfect. A great deal would be guesswork, at least when you only have modern species and fossilized bone structure to go on. But when you start having a wide variety of soft tissues that you can study on both macroscopic and microscopic scales, suddenly that's a very different picture. You know how the cells should look. You can see how each of the organs should be developing. You know what proteins are being produced - at least the bulk ones. It might actually be possible to get quite close to actual dinosaurs, even non-theropod dinosaurs whose specific mutations have been totally lost.

Re:Really?

[Rei]

As you note, the fact that we only have evidence so far of certain pigments doesn't mean that those are the only ones - it just means that they're the only ones we know of today. Also, colours don't only come from pigments. For example, the green of parrots is a diffraction effect.

Re:Really?

[rainer_d]

Make that decades. Or even centuries. The amount of dust that got blown into the atmosphere then was gigantic - after all, traces of it can still be found today, as a visible boundary.
It's probably the closest thing to hell we got.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Paleogene_extinction_event#Duration

Re:Really?

[Dread_ed]

Your deliberate misinterpretation of a single passage about tattoos is telling, especially when combined with your obtuse and prejudicial reading of what I wrote.

I didn't say that religion is immutably valid. I said the lessons of it were. Some of these are the lessons directly from the text that can, with the proper historical framework, impart wisdom. Furthermore, and more in the forefront of what I was referring to, is how incredibly stupid and destructive people can be when they follow religions blindly. Another one, more relevant to this discussion now that you have fully shown your hand by quoting mistranslated passages from a single religious text that you seem obsessed with, is that some apparently intelligent people completely lose the ability to process language and think critically when they encounter the subject of religion either in person or, strangely enough, even in a written comment.

I have observed this before, quite frequently. I write something that is (if read by someone without an axe to grind that is so cumbersome they can't even carry it) a condemnation of the effects of religion. And what I get back is an echo chamber, not of what I have said, but of what the person reading it has going on in their head. Deliberate or reflexive misinterpretation is the only way I can describe it. Its like some anti-religious people are so wrapped up in being anti-religion that at the merest mention of religion they run screaming into conversations and blow their explosive vest of anti-religion talking points without thinking. Whatever it is, it's damn annoying and makes it really hard to have an constructive and responsible conversation about religion with the people who could possibly be in a position to bounce ideas off of.

I also said "in as much as humans are the same as they always have been" which is decidedly different than "humans never change." Implicit in the statement I made is the admission that humans do change. Let me be pedantically specific for you: Societies from earlier times are different in some ways, and exactly the same in many others. Interpersonal relationships are very similar, with some exceptions. The inner world of human experience, self with self, is also very similar. Oh and look! People are still killing each other over religious differences to this day. Also consider you have the same body and brain plan as the first humans. You are genetically similar enough, otherwise you wouldn't be a human! There are an incredible number of human traits that are immutable, hard coded into our genetics, and emergent based on simple processes in the gray and red squishy parts of our bodies. With the qualifying phrase "in as much" I was referring to those things that don't change (or haven't yet changed!) over time.

How about this: Re-read what I wrote with the mindset that much of my inspiration for this mode of thought comes from Richard Dawkins (responsibility for memes and their transmission) and Joseph Campbell (critical analysis of the common archetypes of religious symbolism and application of the same to commonalities of human experience.) Let that sink in for a minute, drop your prejudices, and let me know what you think.

Re: Really?

[cthulhu11]

Thank you for recognizing what Bakker showed us thirty years ago: Birds aren't descended from dinosaurs. They ARE dinosaurs. Re the impact theory I wince every time it is portrayed as truth. There are problems with the evidence, and let's consider say a pathogen as well.

Re: Really?

[RockDoctor]

Oddly, I've been making that point about the non-extinction of dinosaurs here for years. See my sig. What has become increasingly clear in the last decade (though it was really as clear 30 years ago, we just have smaller error-bars these days) is that at least thee events were coincident, to the precision of the geological record - the eruption of the Deccan Traps (and associated volcanics off the Seychelles Platform) ; the impact at Chicxulub (that there was a structure here, and it's approximate age was known 30, even 4 years ago ; it's nature wasn't recognised until the mid 1980s) ; and the extinction of many families of marine, flying and terrestrial animals.

Anyone who is being more precise than that is probably sticking their neck out further than is wise. If in any uncertainty at all, insist on reading the original paper and all supplementary material before commenting. If they've got extraordinarily good data, it'll be clear in the paper ; otherwise it's probably not going to change the error bars much.

What we really need - and people are looking - is to find more appropriate fossils in the Deccan series, which is around a kilometre-thick pile of lavas separated by soils (look at Vesuvius - barely 2000 years between eruptions and thick, productive soils have developed over the ruins of Pompeii). With that we can bracket the extinction event within the lava sequence, and carry out radiometric dating on the lavas to compare to the suevite dates from Chicxulub. They (IODP) have also just finished a coring programme in the Chicxulub crater.

Re:Really?

[RockDoctor]

And, in as much as humans are the same as they always have been, the lessons of religions are immutably valid.

Since every human who ever put finger to keyboard on Slashdot has at the least gone from being a "mewling, puking brat," through an acne-ridden teenager confused over sex, to an approximately well-educated adult who may even occasionally have sex with another person, then yes, I agree. Every human is not at all the same as they've always been, and the lessons of religion are completely mutably invalid.

Which particular invisible sky fairy do you profess allegiance to this year, and when did you last change your invisible sky fairy for a new, upgraded model?

Re:Really?

[RockDoctor]

crocodilians are not descendants of dinosaurs

Agreed.

their common ancestor isn't even as far back as the common ancestor between dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

That is much more dubious. While we can constrain relations between the theropod dinosaurs, crocodilians, turtles, lizards (includes snakes), tuataras, and frogs (out-group) using genetic data, with any morphological data we want to add or can get from fossils. But for the pterosaurs, we only have the morphological data (seen through the filter of taphonomy - the mangling and loss of detail that happens with decomposition and fossilisation). So we're still quite unclear on the origins of the pterosaurs.

The amazing thing to me is it's starting to look more and more like, in the right conditions, you can actually recover soft tissue from dinosaurs, even sequence proteins.

It has certainly happened at least once, and that means the chances of finding more specimens is definitely not zero. Unfortunately, the processes involved favour preservation in massive dense bone (the original find was in a femur from a tyrannosaur). Unfortunately, pterosaur bones are not renowned for their massive construction.

But when you start having a wide variety of soft tissues that you can study on both macroscopic and microscopic scales, suddenly that's a very different picture. You know how the cells should look. You can see how each of the organs should be developing.

You're asking a lot of the fossil record. A huge amount.

Re:Really?

[RockDoctor]

Dinosaurs had evolved for a tropical environment

We don't know that.

We do know that dinosaur species were found at low palaeolatitudes throughout their history. Unfortunately, we've also discovered in the last couple of decades that at some times in their history they also lived year-round above their palaeolatitude for the antarctic circle. And there is evidence for at least migratory presence above the palaeolatitude of their arctic circle.

It is not unreasonable to believe that the dinosaurs evolved in tropical to temperate latitudes - certainly their discovered diversity is greatest in those palaeolatitudes - but if you know of evidence that unambiguously demonstrates that they evolved in a tropical environment ... enlighten me.

Having internal temperature regulation certainly seems to increase the available behavioral response to cope with environmental change without having to change bodily structure (grow a winter coat, for example).

This also explains why most of the reptiles that did survive are aquatic. Water would have helped the aquatic species regulate their body temperatures better.

That may be true. But the persistence of water-dwelling food (fish, pond-weed) could also explain the same observation.

Re:Really?

[RockDoctor]

Now picture that sort of threat display on something as big as, say, a T-rex. Can you think of anything more terrifying than that?

I've seen the business end of a policeman's gun, locked, loaded, and pointing in my eye at about a metre range. That's a very sobering experience. (More sobering when you realise that most of our police are not trained to use weapons or ever issued with them.)

But yes, the behaviour of birds gives us our baseline for the behaviour repertiore of theropods at least.

Re:Really?

[Dread_ed]

One of the lessons of religion is in your reply. Your mind is preoccupied with a certain world view. As a result you become myopic to the truth in front of you. You can't even see reality when it is spelled out for you in plain language on a page. You ignore the meaning of words and insert your own. All you see is your internal state superimposed on external reality.

That is a great lesson to learn more about, especially for someone with your proclivities toward prejudice and pejorative condemnation.

Another lesson, apropos of your completely failed translation of the sentence you quoted, is how some people will react without thinking when they encounter certain subjects. You seem to be triggered by religion.

I could try to educate you about how my post was a criticism of large religious groups and their past actions. I could mention that the overall thrust of the post was to point toward a post-religious future. I could also indicate where I was taking cues from Dawkins, Jung, and Campbell in my post.

And, I could wipe your ass for you as well, but if I did you would never learn to do it for yourself. Grow up.

summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

That is totally not how things went down.

Re:summary is incorrect

[GrumpySteen]

That's not right either. This is how it really happened.

Was this before or after

[Anonymous Coward]

We got off the ark?

Re:Was this before or after

[agm]

Hah! No-one is gullible enough to still believe such nonsense are they?

Re:Was this before or after

[Anonymous Coward]

At least half of the American voters do! Why are you insulting them?!

Re: Was this before or after

[mrmatthewcarlson]

Yeah, at least.

Re:Was this before or after

[agm]

I'm not ridiculing individuals, I'm ridiculing patently absurd ideas. Ridiculous ideas deserve to be ridiculed. People should feel an intellectual shame in believing in goblins, fairies and gods.

Re:Was this before or after

[Opportunist]

Because having imaginary friends is cute if you're under 8, after that it gets kinda sad, and when you pass 20 it gets scary.

Re:Was this before or after

[Camel Pilot]

I have facebook contacts that seriously promote a flat earth...

Re:Was this before or after

[perpenso]

Hah! No-one is gullible enough to still believe such nonsense are they?

The B-Ark seems unlikely to you?

Re:Was this before or after

[h33t l4x0r]

Are your facebook contacts 4th+ dimensional beings?

Re:Was this before or after

[RabidReindeer]

Because having imaginary friends is cute if you're under 8, after that it gets kinda sad, and when you pass 20 it gets scary.

When it gets really scary is when you pass it on to your kids.

"Tommy, your great-great-...-great grandparents screwed up. So an all-powerful being says that that means that you deserve to die and then be roasted forever in pain. But don't be afraid. Just ask Jesus and he'll make it all better. He got himself killed painfully just to save you from that. And didn't even bother to ask permission from you first."

Re: Was this before or after

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes a lot more sense than the Universe suddenly appearing from nothing for no reason. You see Tommy there was nothing and then there was something. Science!

Re: Was this before or after

[Anonymice]

So an omnipotent, omniscient being popping out of nothing then crafting us like playdough makes more sense?

Re: Was this before or after

[drinkypoo]

It makes a lot more sense than the Universe suddenly appearing from nothing for no reason.

Religion is for people whose minds are too small to handle ambiguity. Science is fine with saying "This is what we know, which is not everything." Religion has to say "We know everything", because when it fails to answer a question, it fails to provide comfort, and that's all it ever provides. People who are more comforted with any answer than by correct answers take to religion. The rest of us expect some logic behind a statement.

Re: Was this before or after

[Hevel-Varik]

right which is why everyone one and anyone who ever accomplished anything before the past 100 years or so was a believer. Because they weren't as smart as we are. You keep telling yourself that. You've plenty of company.

Re:Was this before or after

[Ol Olsoc]

Hah! No-one is gullible enough to still believe such nonsense are they?

If I had a time machine, I'd go back and bitchslap that punk bastard Noah for bringing mosquitos and ticks on the ark.

Also, I'd like to see all of the animals like the kangaroos, as they finished swimming the thousands of miles across the Indian ocean to the middle east so they wouldn't drown in the flood.

But sad to say, there are indeed people that believe that there was a flood that covered the entire world, at least up to the level of Everest for a short time. Aside from the questions of where did the water come from, and where did it go afterwards, my calculations show that the amount of water that would be required to do that over a 40 day period would be coming down at such a rate that anyone hoping to survive better have a supply of scuba gear, because it would have been a solid wall of water. The ark would have been immediately swamped and sunk

But if you go fundamentalist old testament "Christian", the ARK myth is just one of many silly things you have to believe.

Re:Was this before or after

[operagost]

To be fair, the ticks could have tagged along on the animals just fine. And stagnant water on the deck or in storage could have harbored plenty of mosquito larvae.

What a global flood has to do with the meteor extinction event, I don't know. I know people like to inject off-topic jabs at religion every time dinosaurs are mentioned, but it's tired and not even funny here.

Re: Was this before or after

[invid]

Nono, an omnipotent, omniscient being having always existed makes more sense than the universe not existing and then suddenly popping into existence.

Things suddenly pop into existence all the time. It's how Hawking radiation works.

Re:Was this before or after

[invid]

I have facebook contacts that seriously promote a flat earth...

... held up by 4 elephants...

Re:Was this before or after

[laurencetux]

I would think that when the Mantle went Boom basically the entire world had around of WILL IT BLEND!!
  you can't really say that This Mountain was in place PreFlood.

refs
Gen 7:11
"11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened."

https://answersingenesis.org/t...

but yeah Meteor or Flood i would bet that 90% of the species (hint "kind" is not species) got wiped out.

and Hmm having a very literal ARK with a bunch of Proto-Critters and Keepers would be right handy for making sure Life Carried On

Re: Was this before or after

[drinkypoo]

right which is why everyone one and anyone who ever accomplished anything before the past 100 years or so was a believer.

Advertising works, and nothing has been sold so hard as religion.

Re: Was this before or after

[Opportunist]

And someone having always existed makes sense? How so?

An omnipotent being compounds the problem, because now that being has to come from somewhere. And "has always existed" makes no sense whatsoever because everything, literally everything, we observe is finite. We have not observed anything infinite so far. Wishing something into existence doesn't make it so.

Re: Was this before or after

[Opportunist]

And just ponder how much they could have accomplished if they hadn't been weighed down by false assumptions that MUST BE RIGHT or some imaginary buddy gets mighty mad.

There is a reason why science picked up a lot of speed in those past 200 years or so. Mostly that we dumped the baggage and concentrated on reality.

Re:Was this before or after

[ceoyoyo]

Well, it is pretty flat in a polar coordinate system.

Re:Was this before or after

[david_thornley]

You can make long lists of names of Christian scientists (not Christian Scientists, although I suppose you could come up with a lot of names there too). Many Christian denominations have no problem with science, the most notable probably being the Roman Catholic Church. That doesn't mean there isn't a minority of Christians who are aggressively and loudly irrational and stupid, unfortunately.

Re: Was this before or after

[Hevel-Varik]

"Religion is for people whose minds are too small to handle ambiguity..." You agree with that? In that camp you place the entire history of humanity, the giants on whose shoulder's we now stand. I'll say, that some flat earth stuff right there.

Have you ever read Newton, or the founding fathers the United States of America? Did they have small minds? Could they not deal with ambiguity? Really? That's your hypothesis? Because that's the claim I'm responding to. Do you know any living religious people? Are they all more small minded than you? Don't know where you live but I find that hard to believe, unless you really only stick to your own.

You are correct, the pace of scientific discovery has increased, though how much of that advance was made by by athiests is debatable. Calculus anybody? Do some reading into Euler. This is slashdot, where we talk about ipads, so I'll just leave you with that old saw about correlation/causation and invite you to consider theories that better fit the entire body of available evidence.

Re: Was this before or after

[drinkypoo]

Have you ever read Newton, or the founding fathers the United States of America? Did they have small minds? Could they not deal with ambiguity? Really? That's your hypothesis?

Congratulations on completely misunderstanding the argument. Nobody said "small minds". But to religious people, everything happens for a reason. Scientific development for the purpose of better understanding god and/or his creation is better than nothing in the same way that funds spent on military R&D are better than nothing. Either way, you could accomplish so much more if you could just ditch the bullshit, and focus on the science.

For every scientist who was spurred on by the desire to better understand creation, there's a dozen minds which went the other direction and stopped asking questions.

You are correct, the pace of scientific discovery has increased, though how much of that advance was made by by athiests is debatable. Calculus anybody?

Religion has a love-hate relationship with science. When it seems to support religion, religion supports science. When it conflicts with religion, religion denies science and retards education. You can see this at work today in the American Midwest, as well as any number of places where women or persons of low caste aren't permitted to be educated.

Re: Was this before or after

[Hevel-Varik]

fair enough, I misunderstood the argument. thanks for clarifying.

Re:Was this before or after

[Dread_ed]

Ahhh shades of Flatland. You tickled me fiercely with that one. Well done!

Re:Was this before or after

[Dread_ed]

Diverse peoples from all over the world, some with no contact that can be described historically, share a similar myth of a great deluge. Call it nonsense if you want. I prefer to perceive a grain of truth, like the sand at the center of a pearl, encased in cultural and religious nacre, accumulated over millennia.

Re:Was this before or after

[Ol Olsoc]

To be fair, the ticks could have tagged along on the animals just fine. And stagnant water on the deck or in storage could have harbored plenty of mosquito larvae.

What a global flood has to do with the meteor extinction event, I don't know. I know people like to inject off-topic jabs at religion every time dinosaurs are mentioned, but it's tired and not even funny here.

Oddly enough, the post that started this off topic foray is now marked +4 Funny.

As for relevance, a global flood would be another form of extinction event. Regardless, at one point most adherents thought of it as allegory until the relatively recent literal interpretation folks demanded that it was literal.

I suspect a possibility of the Mediterranean sea flooding event such as one that happened around 7600 years ago, with the concurrent attributions as a punishment from the Abrahamic deity. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo...

Similar floods have been mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or perhaps Epic of Atrahasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And at the time, when the People of the middle east were not spread out over the entire world, it might have seemed like a flood that covered the entire world, or perhaps just grew in the telling.

But to answer your question of why people take those digs, it is because of just how preposterous the claims are for the literal Noachian flood.

And since this place claims to be science http://creationmuseum.org/ it is fair game. Especiallly skin they claim the science of humans and dinosaurs co-existing.

Re: Was this before or after

[Opportunist]

Religion doesn't get into the way of science all the time. Only when it could contradict science. That's why you can have advances in math even with religion, few religions get into the way of math. And we owe a lot of mathematical breakthroughs to the Muslim world.

But as soon as religion has a predetermined position about something, it gets ugly. Just look how long it took until it was "acceptable" to put the sun into the center of our solar system. How many people had to fear for their very life just because they wanted to find the truth, even if it contradicts an insignificant, stupid little book written by desert dwelling barbarians that for some odd reason is still considered relevant by some idiots, even today.

Re: Was this before or after

[Anonymice]

Why is your all-seeing invisible being allowed to have always existed, but not our own universe?

Re:Was this before or after

[RockDoctor]

At least half of the American voters do [believe in Creationism]! Why are you insulting them?!

Because in this respect they are individually and communally stupid.

Re:Was this before or after

[RockDoctor]

As for relevance, a global flood would be another form of extinction event.

There's no shortage of work been done on the sedimentology and taphonomy of flood deposits. They can be locally important.

Global flood - hasn't happened since the last time the oceans got boiled down by a major asteroid impact. The was probably 4 billion plus years ago, and even then there probably were deepest ocean basins that didn't lose all their water, and small (a few percent, maybe) of land underlain by SIAL-ic (low density) crust by that point. There had to have been to give the isotope compositions in some of the overgrowth layers in the Jack Hills zircons.

Sorry - bringing evidence to a theological gum-flapping exercise. Next thing you know, I'll be shitting on the carpet and propositioning the vicar's daughter.

Re:Was this before or after

[Ol Olsoc]

Sorry - bringing evidence to a theological gum-flapping exercise. Next thing you know, I'll be shitting on the carpet and propositioning the vicar's daughter.

You'll do better if you reverse the order of those two things.

Re:Was this before or after

[RockDoctor]

You don't know some of the vicars daughter's I know. Two girls, one cup.

Re:Was this before or after

[Ol Olsoc]

You don't know some of the vicars daughter's I know. Two girls, one cup.

Guess I'll pass on that.

Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"

Just as I am a descendent of my parents, and we are all humans, birds are both dinosaurs and descendents of dinosaurs. Let's not get into gum flapping about that, I hope.

Meanwhile, my backyard is a riot of colorful little dinos, from the Blue Jays, the Gold Finches, the Grackles, and Titmice. The Downy, Hairy and Redheaded woodpeckers come to a suspended log feeder with suet, and we have a family of Pileated Woodpeckers that can beat the crap out of any dead limbs while searching for food.

Part of why I suspect that the so called "Age of Dinosaurs" was actually quite colorful.

Re:Was this before or after

[cwsumner]

Actually, though, the belief that they -don't- exist is just as ridiculous as the belief that they -do- exist. We can only say that they don't exist -here- and -now-. "Here" being limited by line of sight, "now" being limited by how long we are at location "here". Generalizing it further degrades the confidense level, rapidly.

The truth of the world is that we don't "know", we only suspect a lot.

But a good engineer can do a lot with "kentucky windage" and "fudge factors". 8-)
(We have gotten "approximatly" down to 1 in 10^17, in some fields.)

Nothing surprising here

[mykepredko]

I always imagined that dinosaurs, as part of an ecosystem, were fairly well adapted to their environment. After the "extinction event", which significantly changed the environment and lead to their extinction would also result in the elimination of many species (both flora and fauna).

What I found interesting that is hinted at in the TFA (and had not thought about) was the creation/availability of niches for surviving species to take over and evolve into.

I would be quite interested in finding out if there are any fossil remains of mammals and how they fit into the ecosystem with dinosaurs before the big one hit. Other than cockroaches, I suspect that the Earth's inhabitants were wildly different and the different creatures inhabited different parts of the food chain would be very different from the ones that inhabited it after the meteor strike.

Hopefully this research will result in more study being taken in the world of 60+ million years ago.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[ITRambo]

Today's birds are what remains of dinosaurs, at lest the ones with wings that could get to safer ground, or air. The big dinos bit the dust. We came from very nimble and intelligent creatures that grew up and got even smarter, while removing the competition for food. Yeah, we kind of knew this.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Sique]

Crocodiles and the non-bird flying lizards like the Pterodactylus together with the dinosaurs form one group, the so called archosaurs. This group is very old and appeared around 250 million years ago, branching into crocodiles, winged lizards and dinosaurs around 235 million years ago. Crocodiles were once a very diverse group, and many ancient large dinosaur-like lizards were in fact crocodiles. There were even crocodiles that looked like a crossbred of dolphins and seals, like Metriorhynchus. For some time, the crocodiles were the top predators, until the dinosaurs grew large and replaced them almost everywhere.

On the other hand, the Komodo dragon is not very closely related to the dinosaurs. It belongs with snakes, many small lizards and the ancient mosasaurs (mostly marine species) to their own group, the Squamata (scaled reptiles). It is the sister group to the archosaurs, also appearing 250 million years ago.

The whole story is quite complicated and fascinating. The KT-boundary basicly wiped out every animal that was larger than around two feet on land and three feet in the water. This was true for most of the mammals, most of the birds, all of the winged lizards, all marine lizards etc.pp.. And it took some million years for the remaining groups to recover. Birds for instance survived only on an island around Patagonia, all other ancient birds like the Hesperornithes died out.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[RabidReindeer]

When I was a wee lad, "Dinosaurs" were the "terrible lizards" and basically anything reptilian-like that lived long ago qualified.

These days many of those creatures don't qualify, but now birds do.

Still, when people talk about "did men co-exist with dinosaurs?" they're thinking Fred Flintstone and Dino or Jesus Christ riding a tyrannosaur, not old Mrs. Perkins with her budgies.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Sique]

The term "dinosaur" was coined in 1842 by Richard Owen and indeed means "terrible lizard". If we include all the species Richard Owen described as dinosaurs, and include their last common ancestor and all the offspring of the last common ancestor, we get exactly the modern meaning of "dinosaur", including the birds, and excluding crocodiles, pterodactyls, mosasaurs and the Komodo dragon.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

>I would be quite interested in finding out if there are any fossil remains of mammals and how they fit into the ecosystem with dinosaurs before the big one hit

There are, plenty. The oldest mammal fossils are between 150 and 200 millions years old. Mammals and Dinosaurs coexisted for a very long time. We identify early mammals by their teeth. Mammals alone have precisely interlocking teeth. This came at a price. Sharks and crocodiles can replace lost teeth indefinitely - but when you have precisely interlocking teeth every tooth is a snowflake, and so you can't just sausage-factory out infinite replacements. Mammals therefore only have two sets of teeth - one smaller set that sees them through childhood and a larger set through adulthood. All our dental issues and root cannals began with that.

But it has a catch - to make the first set last through childhood, it had to be bigger than what can fit infancy - so for the first part of their lives mammal babies have no teeth at all. So they needed a new food source for babies. Thus was evolved: milk.

So the teeth are a key clue to whether or not a creature was milk-producing, and it's how we differentiate early mammals from their reptilian contemporaries and close ancestors. The reason the date-span is so long (150-200 million) is that the oldest likely mammal fossil we have is 200-million years old, but many paleontologists believe it should be considered a reptile ancestor of mammals and not a true mammal yet. By 150-milliion years ago though, there were plenty of mammals and they were definitely mammals. These first definite mammals were morganucodontids which were tiny creatures that looked rather like shrews. They probably at seeds and the occasional dinosaur egg and were likely eaten by the smaller predatory dinosaurs in turn. They were however, brainy little guys. Their skull cavity for body mass ratio was far higher than any known dinosaur. They were our ancestors - and the mammalian trait of intelligence was already established.

  By the time of the K/T event they had diversified significantly into a number of species. What the study now actually says is that most of those species did not survive K/T - only a small number here and there made it through. And then, as plantlife recovered, there were these massive ecosystem niches ready to be taken advantage off - and no big creatures in the way, and those mammals were perfectly poised to take advantage. You often find the greatest diversity right after mass extinctions. With so many creatures gone, for a while almost any body plan can offer a workable survival advantage - and then as they start to compet with each other, it narrows down again into the winning categories.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

>What about creatures like crocodiles, alligators, and the Komodo dragon which all could pass for dinosaurs?

Could pass for - but aren't. They are different families in the reptile kingdom entirely. Many of whom predated the dinosaurs. Even when dinosaurs were around they were not the *only* large reptilian family - they were in fact just one of four (that we know off). They were, however, the largest LANDLIVING reptiles at the time. The number two spot goes to the Pterosaurs, even though most people only know Pterodactyl who wasn't even the most impressive of that family, and which are constantly filed in with dinosaurs (in every dino movie for one) even though they were not dinosaurs (and very, very distant relatives). There were hardly any aquatic dinosaurs - the oceans then belonged to the Mosasaurs and Icthyosaurs -two families that were both just as diverse as dinosaurs. The ichthyosaurs were essentially reptilian dolphins and whales but they eventually went extinct after being outcompeted by the plesiosaurs - the third major aquatic reptile family.
And all this is still just the highlights package - I mean in the late triassic there were already turtles in the oceans - among them two whale-sized giants that could swallow a modern leatherback without chewing. Imagine a two-tonne turtle. And their descendents are also still with us.

Horse-shoe crabs are the last surviving member of a family that ruled the the oceans some 350-million years ago - long before any of these reptiles. The rise of the reptile predators probably helped along the extinction of every single species in that family - but the horse-shoes survived (and are not crabs), then outlived the great reptiles and continued right into present day - where they now hold the record as the animal that has directly saved more human lives than any other.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

Omnivores often have an advantage in that they can survive in more habitats and handle habitat changes more readily. The price they pay for it is the jack-of-all-trades price. Omnivores generally aren't as good as specialists at getting any particular kind of food. So if a change leaves only one good food source available, and a specialist is available then the omnivores lose out.

So to say they had the advantage would be an excessive generalization. They probably had an advantage in many places - and were the first to go in others.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[TheRaven64]

Crocodiles are not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs legs point directly downwards, crocodiles and most modern reptiles have legs that point sideways. Additionally, crocodiles have very different skin structure. If you go to a natural history museum, you'll typically find a detailed explanation of the difference.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Immerman]

Not really. Crocodiles, etc are reptiles - a branch of life that predates dinosaurs - there were giant crocodilians, etc. wandering the world long before dinosaurs came along - we call it the Age of Reptiles. Dinosaurs were a very different beast, an intermediary evolutionary step between reptiles and birds, and likely were at least somewhat warm-blooded and had numerous other dramatic differences from their reptile ancestors.

Meanwhile, during and after the Age of Dinosaurs reptiles continued to refine their own evolutionary advantages, and some forms, like the basic crocodile body shape, were already so optimized to a persistent enough niche that there are few obvious changes between then and now. Sharks hit upon a similarly optimized body shape early on, and if you went back before reptiles had evolved, or even amphibians, during the Age of Fishes, you would see fish that were already recognizably sharks. Still lots of internal changes going on, but the basic form had already been well-optimized. Things like horseshoe crabs can be traced back even further.

"The look", by which I assume you mean sturdy armor, big teeth, strong jaws, etc. was fairly common at the time, likely because armor was one of the earliest defenses to evolve, back before bodies (or brains) had been optimized for speed or agility. Easiest way to not be eaten is to be too hard to eat. At least until someone else evolves the jaws to crunch through your armor...

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Immerman]

Except there's pretty much never only one food source. What would it be? Some kind of plant I suppose? But if there's plants, then herbivores and omnivores will be close behind. And then you have animals, and both carnivores and omnivores can eat those. Including their own kind. (Usually only if other food is scarce. Usually).

Re: Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

And the aftermath of a massive asteroid crash that eradicated almost all plantlife definitely is not an ordinary situation. Its entirely feasible that in many regions only one plant would have survived.
Keep in mind also that plants themselves were different. Shrubs and ferns mostly. Large landcoverers didnt exist. Hell grass only evolved about 15 to 20 million years ago.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Quirkz]

but the horse-shoes survived (and are not crabs), then outlived the great reptiles and continued right into present day - where they now hold the record as the animal that has directly saved more human lives than any other.

How do they save human lives? I must have missed that headline.

Nice rundown, particularly of the aquatic history, which I don't know as well as the land-based history. I was recently at the Houston natural history museum and saw a couple of the giant turtle skeletons. Those things were enormous! I think the kids were most impressed with them, maybe because they're already familiar with modern turtles and could appreciate the difference in size.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[jae471]

Crocodilians and dinosaurs (and birds) share a common ancestor. They are all considered Archosaurs, along with pterosaurs and a handful of other extinct species that don't fit into neatly of those groups.

To put it another way, Archosaurs can be defined as a Blue Jay, an American Alligator, their most recent common ancestor, and all descendants (living and extinct) of that ancestor. (Any living bird and any living crocodilian will satisfy this definition).

Dinosaurs, using a similar definition, can be defined as a Blue Jay, a Triceratops, their most recent common ancestor, and all descendants (living and extinct) of that ancestor. (Any living bird and any ornithithischian dinosaur -- Triceratops, Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, etc. -- will satisfy this definition. However, using common extinct saurischian dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor will not.)

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Wargames]

Horseshoe crab blood powder derivitive is used to determine if vaccines are tainted by bacteria.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[Maow]

where they [horseshoe crabs] now hold the record as the animal that has directly saved more human lives than any other.

Can you expand on that?

I had a look on Wikipedia for horseshoe crabs and saw they're a food source but can't reconcile that with your statement.

Thanks.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

Horseshoe crabs have blue blood because their blood oxygen chemistry is based on copper (most living animals use iron for that purpose) - but it's unique in other ways too. The Horseshoe crab has one of the most powerful and unique immune systems in the world. Whenever any foreign body enters their bloodstream the blood just clots around it. This would kill a mammal but since they have an exoskeleton floating blood clots are no major issue. However it makes their blood the most powerful parasite and bacteria detector known to man. Every year we draw blood from thousands of them and then release them again - and that blood is used to test medicines and vaccines to ensure that the stuff we inject into humans aren't carrying pathogens.
Without them we would have no test nearly as reliable to detect tainted medicines before they are used - and the death rate from tainted medicines (notably vaccines) would be huge, like it was before we discovered this.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[RockDoctor]

and the Komodo dragon.

The Komodo Dragon is a varanid (a.k.a. monitor) lizard, a squamate. It is classified in with the American Gila monster, the British "Slow Worm" and any chameleon you are to mention. Net closest group is any snake you care to mention (the "Slow Worm" is not a snake).

The precise relations of the squamates + tuataras, turtles, pterosaurs (Pterodactylus is a genus, not a higher-level group), mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and pleisosaurs to the clade of birds + crocodilians are still a matter of disagreement. Since we've only got fossil evidence for a number of those groups.

Re: Nothing surprising here

[RockDoctor]

Keep in mind also that plants themselves were different. Shrubs and ferns mostly. Large landcoverers didnt exist. Hell grass only evolved about 15 to 20 million years ago

The angiosperms evolved in the latest Jurassic or early Cretaceous (they live on land ; this is not good for being fossiised). You're more likely to know "angiosperms" as the "flowering plants" - the group includes the grasses, which have very small and boring flowers.

Most things you'd call a "shrub" are also angiosperms. Perhaps you mean "cycads", not "shrubs"?

Re:Nothing surprising here

[RockDoctor]

There is a ha-ha-but-serious joke that you could fit the entire first hundred million years of the mammal's fossil record into a shoe box - and they'd almost all be teeth. That's probably not been true or a couple of decades now. You'd probably need a fairly large rucksack. But the collection is still overwhelmingly teeth.

And then, as plantlife recovered, there were these massive ecosystem niches ready to be taken advantage off - and no big creatures in the way,

... apart from the birds. There were birds around in very much the same size range as the mammals, and they too underwent a major evolutionary radiation in the early Palaeogene. If you came back 2 million years after the KPg boundary event, you'd have been hard put to decide if the most successful group were the birds or the mammals.

If you count species today, it is still a toss-up : there are about 11000 bird species to a mere 7000 odd mammals. If you count biomass, then the individual mass of humans, pigs, sheep and cattle considerably outweighs chickens and the wild birds.

Re: Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

I looked it up - there seems to be some evidence that contradicts the science I'd been taught which put grass as something that only evolved after Dinosaurs were already gone. Specifically phyoliths found in Dinosaur dung from 67 million yeas ago suggests there was at least some grasses that existed, and were eaten by, dinosaurs since phyoliths are fairly unique to grass.

Re: Nothing surprising here

[RockDoctor]

I'm not sure about the FA (first appearance) of grasses - or phytoliths which would certainly show up more regularly in microfossil samples than recognisable "grass" fossils. However grasses did undergo a considerable differentiation and spread around the Early Miocene, and the change in vegetation led to a change in animal populations. The diversification of horses (before their more recent catastrophic decline) paralelled the spread of grasses.

Prior to 2005, fossil findings indicated that grasses evolved around 55 million years ago. Recent findings of grass-like phytoliths in Cretaceous dinosaur coprolites have pushed this date back to 66 million years ago.[1][9] In 2011, revised dating of the origins of the rice tribe Oryzeae suggested a date as early as 107 to 129 Mya.

Hmmm, that's news to me.

On the other hand, first appearances (FA) are not the same as acmes (peak occurrence of the taxon in question) or indeed last appearances. So a FA for grasses as far back as the Mid-Cretaceous - Early Cretaceous even - remains compatible with a large expansion of the grasses (or of grassland - I'd forgotten that bamboos were grasses) in the mid-Tertiary.

I'll have to do some more research on this.

Re: Nothing surprising here

[silentcoder]

Well paleontology is a difficult science requiring a lot of inference from limited evidence. Most things do not leave fossils when they die.
When Jurassic Park came out the worlds scientists had between them 3 Tyranosaur fossils - not one of them complete. Since then the number has grown well over a dozen - largely attributable to the movie. The renewed interest in dinosaurs equalled grant money so scientists could actually afford to go look for more.
At that time the dinosaur-bird link was a hugely controversial theory. Now it is consensus. We still cannot agree on whether dinosaurs were cold or hot blooded (the birds threw a spanner in the wrench too) or perhaps the lizard-hipped dinosaurs were coldblooded and the bird-hipped ones warmblooded (it would fit the model that bird-hipped dinos were built for speed).
But all this adds up a to a science where every theory could be displaced in just a few years. When your evidence is such a small sample size you simply cannot ever be sure what the next fragment will tell you.

Re: Nothing surprising here

[RockDoctor]

Well, I'm getting good confirmation of my understanding - which you share to some degree - that there was a hange in grass abundance in the not-too-distant past. From http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/t...

The Miocene Epoch, 23.03 to 5.3 million years ago,* was a time of warmer global climates than those in the preceeding Oligocene or the following Pliocene and it's notable in that two major ecosystems made their first appearances: kelp forests and grasslands. The expansion of grasslands is correlated to a drying of continental interiors as the global climate first warmed and then cooled.

That's just a bit confusing - is it a "first appearance" of grasslands, an "expansion of grasslands, or possibly an appearance followed by an expansion. Also note that they're careful to talk of the ecosystem "grassland" rather than specific grass species.

A book on palaeopedology (the science of studying ancient soil deposits ; do I need to point out that changing from (say) open forest to grassland will affect soil structure in ways that will be detectable?) talks on the changes in spore abundance, with diagrams. See particularly fig 20.3 on p.303.

Ah, I'd forgotten about that. C3 versus C4 plants. The Neogene transition from C3 to C4 grasslands in North America: assemblage analysis of fossil phytoliths I'd forgotten bout the C3-C4 transition. (I'm not a plants or fossils person - more high grade metamorphics for me. Plus shit-bagging for pay.)

The rapid ecological expansion of grasses with C4 photosynthesis at the end of the Neogene (8-2 Ma) is well documented in the fossil record of stable carbon isotopes. As one of the most profound vegetation changes to occur in recent geologic time, it paved the way for modern tropical grassland ecosystems.

This was a major change. There was discussion a couple of years ago about using genetic engineering to copy the C4 carbon fixation path from grasses into other crop plants for IIRC a 20% improvement in efficiency. Worth considering, but a lot of work, and not popular with the Greens.

... this broadly synchronous change, long after the evolutionary origin of the C4 pathway in grasses. To date, these hypotheses have suffered from a lack of direct evidence for floral composition and structure during this important transition.

And the paper I'm quoting then provides evidence of the change. The paper is open access, so you cn sweat it as much as you like, but the clearest indicator of change I can see is a decline in tree cover in their study area through the time interval - fig 4-A

The increase in abundance of grasslands in the Miocene is well established, even if the actual families of grasses evolved much earlier. Which does rather raise the question of why it took so long between evolution of the grasses and the development and increase of the grassland ecoystems of the world. That's a good question.

Re: Nothing surprising here

[RockDoctor]

At that time the dinosaur-bird link was a hugely controversial theory.

When was Jurassic Pork? (I've still not seen it) 1993.

The birds are dinosaurs theory was first put forward in any detail in the 1890s (about the time Archaeopteryx #3 was found) and by the 1950s there were about 7 Archaeopteryxes in the record and no other serious contenders for the origin of the birds on the table. By the 1960s, the outstanding questions such as the homologies between the bird "hand" and the stereotypical vertebrate pentadactyl manus had been solved by combinations of gold pellets and dyes injected into developing chick embryos, so the remaining uncertainties about the birds being dinosaurs were dug up, decapitated, mouth stuffed with garlic, put back into the coffin with Holy Water and finally a stake driven through the heart. Just to make sure that the dead uncertainties were really dead. (This doesn't stop the Creationist cretins trying to resurrect them.)

Come the 1970s and people were actually identifying the genes and signaling chemicals at work, controlling the development of chicks into chicks (instead of more stereotypical vertebrates). (Chicks are great to work on - reliable, cheap, and you can cut the shell away to watch the fuckers grow. Try doing that with a human embryo and someone is bound to complain.) Still no doubt about the fact that birds are dinosaurs, but just for safety's sake the vamipre of uncertainty was dug up, chopped up, stuffed with garlic, another stake and a winchester of Papally-blessed dihydrogen monoxide. Still a dead idea. So the Creationists dug it up again the next day and tried to wave it around.

Well, you can see where this is going. Every few years, science would find out something more that re-confirmed the "birds are dinosaurs" theory. Often this would be as a side effect of using those really useful chick developmental models to do things like studying drugs that can affect the growth of bones and nerves and muscles. And more and more wooden stakes and triply-resublimated Papally blessed holy water and all sorts of odouriferous relatives of the onion would get hammered into the tattered corpse of "the controversy of whether birds are dinosaurs" ... and still the fucking Creationists would drag the corpse of the controversy out of the ground and wave it around as if it were a threat to anything.

Is that the controversy you were talking about being live in 1993?

Much though I like the idea of this increasingly dead controversy getting another battering, can we move on? It is an ex-controversy. It has ceased to be. It has shuffled of this mortal coil, gone to join the Choir Immortal (of controversies). It has ceased to be a controversy. Except among the fucking Creationists.

We still cannot agree on whether dinosaurs were cold or hot blooded (the birds threw a spanner in the wrench too)

For theropod dinosaurs (birds included), the bone histology is reckoned pretty conclusively to indicate hot-blooded. [Also, in at least one T. rex specimen, they've found bone with a distinctive structure and location homologous to the bone that chickens build up then re-absorb to store/ release/ buffer calcium minerals for eggshell production.] For the rest of the dinosaurs, I think there is still room for uncertainty. However, by the time that anything weighs several tonnes, the basal metabolism of that flesh (ably assisted by the square-cube relation between volume and surface area) means that they are effectively isothermic (constant body temperature) regardless of whether they are endothermic (generate heat internally for homeostasis ; "hot blooded") or ectothermic (get heat from the environment for homeostasis ; "cold blooded").

Intermediate-sized dinosaurs are where it gets sticky. Which is why the paper published a couple of months ago about a titanosaur chick was so intere

Re:Nothing surprising here

[cwsumner]

Crocodiles are not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs legs point directly downwards, crocodiles and most modern reptiles have legs that point sideways. Additionally, crocodiles have very different skin structure. If you go to a natural history museum, you'll typically find a detailed explanation of the difference.

You are right ... except crocodile legs -can- be pointed downward.
To see them running on land is very rare, and also very terrifying.
Few films exist, but it is speculated that many people, that are killed by crocodiles, are caught this way. Never think a crocodile or alligator can't get you because it is slow. It doesn't have to be... 8-o

Re:Nothing surprising here

[TheRaven64]

I was taught that they can run very quickly in a straight line, but can't turn corners very well so if you need to escape then you should zigzag a lot. More recently, I was told that this is nonsense, so the best strategy appears to be to not live anywhere near them.

Re:Nothing surprising here

[cwsumner]

A lot of people live near them and are still alive, so apperently we are not their preferred food!

The was an artical a few years back, about humans having a bad smell to preditors. Sharks bite prople, but usually spit them out. We might be like stinkbugs...

But I would not bet on it. 8-)

90% of dinosaurs survived?

[chromaexcursion]

Decimated means to kill 1 in 10.
The author is not a very good writer. I believe the word he was looking for is annihilated.
This is science. What words mean is important.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[hcs_$reboot]

Another (main) meaning of "decimate" is "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of". Who knows exactly how much time it took to eliminate the last dinosaur after the asteroid impact?

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[dbIII]

The beige box is now the "hard drive". To the Romans decimate was killing one in ten, to journalists today it means killing a lot more than one in ten.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Waffle Iron]

That word, as defined by pedants, is utterly useless. Other than those who hail from one particular ancient civilization that had a certain peculiar military punishment, nobody kills exactly 1 in 10 of anything.

That's why the vast majority of the population who have normal minds use an entirely different definition of the word. A definition that's actually relevant to enough real situations to justify the word's existence.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Black Parrot]

Believe it or not, the meanings of words change with time.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Ly4]

That's just silly and egregiously awful - I can't fathom why you are trying to quell the myriad changes we've seen in language.

(just in case you didn't know: many of the words in the above sentence, both sesquipedalian and otherwise, used to mean something completely different)

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

So, the word should technically be novemate? Novem is latin for 9...but I'm pretty sure novemate isn't a "real word" in any language lol.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Opportunist]

FINALLY!

While we're at pet peeves, don't call big changes "quantum leaps" either. A quantum leap is literally the smallest distance you could possibly move.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[aevan]

So we can start calling magazines clips now?

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Please take your argument to Oxford...

1 Kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of: the inhabitants of the country had been decimated

1.1 Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): public transport has been decimated

2 historical Kill one in every ten of (a group of people, originally a mutinous Roman legion) as a punishment for the whole group: the man who is to determine whether it be necessary to decimate a large body of mutineers

Although I suspect you won't get very far with it there.

Re: 90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Please. Sheldon would not have been obnoxious and obtuse. Sheldon would have been obnoxious, obtuse, and correct.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[sexconker]

Believe it or not, not all change is for the better. Further, this isn't a change in meaning, it's an additional meaning that confuses the existing meaning.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[sexconker]

Do it correctly.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[perpenso]

Decimated means to kill 1 in 10.

In Latin, not so much in English. Yes, in English if the context is discipline in the Roman Legion, otherwise, 1 in 10 is a historical anachronism not a primary definition.

The author is not a very good writer. I believe the word he was looking for is annihilated. This is science. What words mean is important.

As politicians should leave science to the scientists, so should scientists leave the English language to the English major types and not try to misapply their love of metric prefixes like "deci". :-)

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[perpenso]

So we can start calling magazines clips now?

Yes if you are using Latin. :-)

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[umghhh]

As the discussion here got sheldonized already anyway I allow myself to add that some of the dinos that died trough the impact and whose species did not survive the aftermath must have had an offspring so indeed already there it is true.
I suspect however that you meant that there is a chance some of the species of dinos survived an impact which would assume they had an offspring and it survived.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[quenda]

Decimated means to kill 1 in 10. What words mean is important.

What a travesty! Ironically, it begs the question, why are we disinterested?

Re: 90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Pfhorrest]

"Organic" has connotations far broader and predating the chemical one. The adjective "organic" as applied to chemistry is an application of one of those older senses, the one meaning "pertaining to life", and even that is not the original sense.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[ultranova]

The "deci" in the word should clue you into the amount, and the "mate" should clue you into what happens to the amount.

A 10-way orgy?

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[dave420]

Oh you poor prescriptive fool. That boat sailed a long time ago.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[silentcoder]

It took me all of 5 seconds on dictionary.com to confirm that both meanings are valid and, in fact, the meaning as used in the summary is the primary definition - and thus the MORE correct one.

Words change meanings over time, and get new meanings added. It is not WRONG to use these new meanings - by that logic we all need to go back to whatever proto-language homo erectus spoke - because pretty much every language on earth exists because of new words that were invented and old words that had their meanings altered and expanded over time.

It's really rather annoying when grammar and vocabulary nazis don't actually know grammar and vocabulary.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

SI units are clear, decimate is to kill 10%. centimate is kill 1 in 100, millimate is 1 in 1000. Since the SI units go up or down by factor 10, the extinction event is actually 9.3 decimates.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[silentcoder]

It is, also, an official dictionary meaning.
If you're going to get pedantic about what words can and cannot mean then you have to have some sort of neutal way to arbitrate or anybody could pedantically insist on any meaning as the only meaning and we would be left with all the pedants arranging a deathmatch among themselves to select the wordmaster - whoever is still standing at the end.
Alternatively we can use the dictionary, a work compiled by expert lexicographers as the measure by which we can arbitrate such disputes.

The choice is yours. I rather hope you choose the deathmatch. I'll buy a ticket to see that.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[silentcoder]

Yeah... we all look forward to the publication of "Sexconker's dictionary of 'because I fucking said so'".

Will you be finishing that in parallel with your current project "10001 cures for wanker's cramp" or will you be starting it after that's published ?

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[DRJlaw]

I wouldn't get very far because they're fucking retards like you. The one thing the French government does that others should also do is preserve the fucking language so it doesn't get fucked to the point of becoming nothing but grunts and emojis.

Forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfao urum gyltendum, you modern English-speaking bastard.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[drinkypoo]

Decimated means to kill 1 in 10.

That's what it originally meant. If you knew how to internet, you could figure out that it now has other meanings.

This is science. What words mean is important.

And yet here you are, still ignorant of how to use a dictionary. I guess you don't have to feel very bad about that; An absolute shit-ton of Slashdotters have not figured that one out. You should probably refrain from telling other people what words mean, though, until you do.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[drinkypoo]

Then your understanding of all things quantum is lousy. Quantum leaps refer to jumps without an intervening period of continual development, similar to tunneling. This distance can be large.

You mean, perceived jumps

We don't really know what it did in between, because we weren't looking

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[sootman]

Sigh. http://blog.oxforddictionaries...

"But the claim that decimate should be used to mean naught but to 'put to death (or destroy) one of every ten' has deeper problems than that. For it is not at all clear that this punitive sense is indeed the earliest definition of the word...

"So given that these two meanings of decimate appeared almost simultaneously, why are we so obsessed with assigning the punitive meaning to the word? A likely answer is that people are falling prey to what is known as the Etymological Fallacy, a tendency to believe that a word's current meaning should be dictated by its roots. Unfortunately for the etymological purists, decimate comes from the Medieval Latin word decimatus, which means 'to tithe'. The word was then assigned retrospectively to the Roman practice of punishing every tenth soldier."

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Believe it or not, not all change is for the better. Further, this isn't a change in meaning, it's an additional meaning that confuses the existing meaning.

Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something." That meaning is actually the most NOVEL English meaning, created by ill-informed language pedants in the late 1800s.

The word decimatio in Latin did refer to that ancient Roman practice of killing 1 in 10 soldiers as a punishment. Around 1600, the words decimate and decimation entered English and three ENGLISH meanings emerged:

(1) Referring to a tax or church tithe amounting to 1/10th of income (now obsolete)

(2) Referring to destruction of a LARGE PORTION (generally much greater than 10%) of something -- this meaning has been around since at least 1650 or so

(3) Referring to the ancient Roman military practice in specialist literature about military history (rare)

Because meaning (1) gradually faded out and meaning (3) was rare, the primary use of the word from about 1700 on was meaning (2) -- the one you find objectionable. But it wasn't until the mid-1800s when some random grammar weirdos started worrying about the etymology of the word that THEY decided there should be a fourth (and NEW) meaning:

(4) Figurative meaning, derived from senses (1) and (3) - referring to destroying 1/10th of something in general

That meaning never existed before language usage pedants just MADE IT UP in the late 1800s, and it never really caught on. 150 years later we still have people like you going around complaining about the decay of English, when you're actually endorsing a meaning that NEVER was the primary meaning of the word and actually NEVER was in use among anyone outside of weirdos who decided the standard use of the word for hundreds of years was "wrong" and made up a new English sense for fit with their classical etymological fantasies.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[sexconker]

And "official" dictionary meaning? Oooooh boy, we've got a live one here!

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[sexconker]

Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something."

Of course it did. You putting that statement in bold doesn't change that.
Just because a definition is "rare" or "old" doesn't mean you get to ignore it.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[umghhh]

I suppose I should have been wearing my glasses.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[ceoyoyo]

The one in ten has sex and produces children? With the other nine?

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[ceoyoyo]

Hello. Welcome to the Internet. I think you'll enjoy this place.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[ceoyoyo]

You know, when playing the part of pedantic troll on Slashdot it's not really fair play to blatantly ignore important words (like "primary") in the messages you reply to.

Wait, I was ignoring the "troll" part. Well done, carry on.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[david_thornley]

An "official" dictionary meaning means one that's been used enough to rate an entry in a dictionary. I believe that Scrabble officially considers a word as eligible if it appears in three out of a certain set of dictionaries.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[david_thornley]

Believe it or not, there's very little use in modern society for a word that means to divide soldiers in groups of ten, and randomly pick one of each ten to be beaten to death by the others using clubs. Much like the keyword "auto" in C and pre-2011 C++, the word needed a new meaning to be useful.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[ceoyoyo]

A quantum leap is a jump without existing in the intervening states because those states are not possible. The OP is correct, a quantum leap is literally the smallest possible change.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Zontar The Mindless]

My, aren't we testy today.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[Dread_ed]

Your "precise definition" is thousands of years out of date. For people who speak modern English we learn to use a dictionary and use terms as they are defined. If you look it up, part of the definition is to kill a large number of something. The 1/10 usage is secondary and also carries the implication of a disciplinary self selection process by drawing lots to see who gets killed. Since we don't have armies that split themselves into 10 man groups for discipline and then draw straws to see who the other 9 have to kill, the original usage of the word is culturally stale to say the least.

You don't say "visit" when you mean "to kick someone's ass" do you? Well why not you archaic fossil? It's an old usage of the word. Or are you just very particular with words that appear to have a similar appearance to SI units?

Finally, the lain root is "decim" meaning 10. Your reference to "mate" in addition to being vague and incomplete, is also incorrect. If the root "mate" was used, which is doubtful with the phoneme "m" already present in "decem", it might describe 10 mothers, as "mater" is the closest Latin root word to "mate."

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[RockDoctor]

The old debate about "decimate" is boring. Yes, it's meaning has drifted from its original. These things happen.

The author is not a very good writer. I believe the word he was looking for is annihilated.

What English actually lacks is a word which unambiguously means "a very large but not complete loss." "Annihilate" does not work because it means "to kill every last one of [group]". In this context : "at the K-Pg boundary event, the ichthyosaurs were annihilated, but a mere 90% of mammals and dinosaurs were killed off".

That's the popular meaning of "decimate", but because "decimate" does have this original other meaning of a "large but not crippling loss" it's not a word I'd use, because of the ambiguity.

It's a definite lack, and it comes up every time extinction events get discussed. How does "nonimate" sound - for killing 9 in 10 of [group].

"Hecatomb" - "a hundred oxen" for a very large sacrifice is in the right direction meaning-wise, but I still don't find it satisfying.

Does anyone have an appropriate word in their native tongues? After having at least one 30% death event in their history, I wouldn't be surprised if Icelandic had a suitable word. And I like "jokullhlaup," and work it into the conversation at every possible opportunity. Rei can have his rant about Unicode now - there should be at least one umlaut in "jokulhlaup."

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Let's clear up one thing: the word "decimate" has NEVER had a primary English meaning of "to destroy/kill/etc. 1 in 10 of something."

Of course it did. You putting that statement in bold doesn't change that.

Please note the word "primary." The word has never had that definition as its primary meaning.

Just because a definition is "rare" or "old" doesn't mean you get to ignore it.

Actually, if you read what I wrote, I was noting that your meaning is the newest sense, an argument meant to counter your claim that we've moved away from your definition over time. Does the meaning exist? Sure. But the vast majority of people who hear the word are unaware of it, and it has never been the case that most people hearing that word spoken in English would assume your meaning as the primary sense.

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[cwsumner]

So we can start calling magazines clips now?

They are definatly different, some rifles can use either, and if you order the other you will definatly get the wrong thing! 8-}

Re:90% of dinosaurs survived?

[cwsumner]

The dictionaries warn you of the common usages. They don't say that those are correct usage, if you want other people to understand you.

Brontosaurus?

[cammoblammo]

It's been a long time since I studied any paleontology. Has the status of the brontosaurus gone from 'Whoops, never existed!' to 'Double whoops! Turns out it did!'?

Re:Brontosaurus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Brontosaurus?

[cammoblammo]

Well, damn! My inner nine-year-old is rather pleased and doing his 'I told you so!' dance in my current self's direction.

Re:Brontosaurus?

[Quirkz]

The best part of this is most of the other dinosaurs built on that model (giant size, four legs, elephant midsection, long neck and tail) have unpronounceable names. At least I can say brontosaurus. Diplodocus is second best, and thirty years later I'm still not sure about that one.

Re:Brontosaurus?

[mcswell]

But even so, the Brontosaurs died out after the Jurassic, long before the extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous.

Birds are evidence...

[EzInKy]

...that the dinosaurs did not really do that badly, they just evolved to suit their environments.

I have nothing to contribute this time, sorry

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Scientists Say The Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Almost Wiped Us Out Too

Heh. I had this picture in my head of a caveman riding on the back of a be-saddled T-Rex looking at a huge flash of light in the distance going: "What the fuck was that?!"

Re:I have nothing to contribute this time, sorry

[ultranova]

I had this picture in my head of a caveman riding on the back of a be-saddled T-Rex looking at a huge flash of light in the distance going: "What the fuck was that?!"

Why have cavemen when you can have futuristic soldiers equipping dinos with laser guns?

According to OED, you are incorrect about decimate

[Texmaize]

According to the Oxford English dictionary, decimate meaning to kill 1/10 is something of an urban legend. You can read it for yourself here.

http://blog.oxforddictionaries...

Switching positions twice

[Tablizer]

Just before the Permian-Triassic extinction event (PT), about 250m years ago, large mammal-like reptiles (proto-mammals) were more common than lizard-like reptiles. The proto-mammals were the top of the food-chain.

But after PT, the lizard-like reptiles recovered faster, becoming the dinosaurs, and the proto-mammals were mostly small skittish creatures.

The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event* (CP), the one that ended the dino's about 65m years ago, was pretty much the reverse: the lizard-ish reptiles recovered slower than the mammals.

There was a short period early in the CP recovery where large dinosaur-like birds, think ostrich on steroids, seemed to have had the upper hand. (Birds are closely related to the dino's.) But, mammals eventually prevailed, as least as the largest beasts.

If Trump gets us nuked, large dino/birds/lizards may make a comeback. If the pattern continues, it's their turn again.

* Also known as Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event

Re:Switching positions twice

[quenda]

And the surviving dinosaurs are definitely warm blooded.

Re:Switching positions twice

[Hognoxious]

Am I the only one who's noticed that these mass extinctions tend to occur around changeovers from one geological period to the next?

I think a little extra caution is warranted around those times.

Re:Switching positions twice

[Tablizer]

True, but most snakes and lizards have lower metabolism, and thus don't need as much food and water, which may have been scarce after a climate disaster.

Re:Switching positions twice

[Tablizer]

You mean decimals got decimated? If humans had 12 fingers, would it be "heximated"?

Re:Switching positions twice

[Hognoxious]

No, duodecimated.

Re:For all intensive purposes --free complaint the

[I'm New Around Here]

You won't win that battle.

You have people use "begs the question wrong" and say things like "Trump is literally Hitler" (Which would mean that Trump is actually Adolph Hitler). And spell things wrong and it becomes the norm, can't think of example

You probably see the word "voila" spelled horribly without even considering it.

You are all wrong

[a_claudiu]

European animals were decimated, american ones were inchimated.

Re:Survival clues

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we need to ensure the extinction of species Donaldis Trumpus for the other Homo Sapiens to survive.

--sf

Re:Elementry School

[Anonymous Coward]

I turn 40 on my next birthday

No doubt you're a 40 year old virgin.

All aboard!

[DarthVain]

Saw an ad for this on TV the other day:

https://arkencounter.com/ ...and was like wtf?!

Boggles the mind.

Re:Scientists say a lot of stupidities

[Ol Olsoc]

For example, climate change.

So do anonymous cowards.

There were small dinosaurs also.

[pjv936]

Ones that ate insects. There were also flying reptiles. I can understand why the large dinosaurs died out. But I can't understand why the smaller dinosaurs and the flying reptiles died out while mammals and birds survived. I understand why crocs, tortoises, and other reptiles survived and that is because they can go for very long periods of time without food. Small mammals and birds can't.

"Possum-sized"?!

[Mr Foobar]

Why use a opossum as a size indicator? They are a marsupial, not a mammal like ourselves. An opossum is about the same size as a standard house cat, and a cat is a mammal, same as a human. And very possibly more familiar to folks outside North America.

Only thing I can think is it gives some credence to that link, showing that the opossum's existence is due to the same event that lead to the proto-mammal that later split into simians and felids. Still would have made more sense to a banana.

Re:"Possum-sized"?!

[Agripa]

Mammals as a group include monotremes (duck billed platypus), marsupials (opossum), and placental mammals. The placental groups originated 105 to 120 million years ago so if you want to talk about earlier mammals, you are limited to monotremes and marsupials.

Re:"Possum-sized"?!

[RockDoctor]

We have so few body fossils from early mammals that it is very had to tell when the modern groups evolved. Most of the dates you've given are based on molecular clocks, which are probably right in sequence of splits, but unless you an pin some of the branching points with fossil evidence, thee absolute ages are much more suspect.

A seriously high proportion of mammal fossils are isolated teeth, or short sections of mandible/ dentary, because the teeth are both hard and tough. Unfortunately, while teeth tell you lots about diet, they don't tell you much about reproductive biology.

People are looking for more fossils.

Re:For all intensive purposes --free complaint the

[cellocgw]

You probably see the word "voila" spelled horribly without even considering it.

No, we deliberately misspell it "viola" because the viola is the Joe Btfsplk of the orchestra.

Scientists say

[dhaen]

Am I alone in hating this opening? It's as if scientists are a different species, or have a different way of thinking than the ordinary person. I look up to people who demonstrate a better understanding or a more reasoned view of the perspective. However, being a technologist and engineer, I find myself in parallel with the ideas presented. I feel as if I'm expected to observe myself through a microscope in a petri dish.

wait what so they actually were stupid

[Hevel-Varik]

... that's what you're claiming? "Religion is for people whose minds are too small to handle ambiguity..." You agree with that? In that camp you place the entire history of humanity, the giants on whose shoulder's we now stand. I'll say, that some flat earth stuff right there.

Have you ever read Newton, or the founding fathers the United States of America? Did they have small minds? Could they not deal with ambiguity? Really? That's your hypothesis? Because that's the claim I'm responding to. Do you know any living religious people? Are they all more small minded than you? Don't know where you live but I find that hard to believe, unless you really only stick to your own.

You are correct, the pace of scientific discovery has increased, though how much of that advance was made by by athiests is debatable. Calculus anybody? Do some reading into Euler. This is slashdot, where we talk about ipads, so I'll just leave you with that old saw about correlation/causation and invite you to consider theories that better fit the entire body of available evidence.

Decimated?

[Paleolibertarian]

People Please!!!!

Learn the accurate definition of the word "decimate".

This is from Latin which means to kill or punish every tenth man. This is 1/10th at most.

People generally use the expression to mean almost ALL which is very incorrect.

Re:For all intensive purposes --free complaint the

[I'm New Around Here]

No, I don't mean the swap the i and o around. I mean the replace them totally, as well as the v, with other letters.

Re:Oxgen levels?

[RockDoctor]

Oxygen levels have certainly varied. Unfortunately for your thesis, both dinosaurs and mammals evolved in a relatively low oxygen period (along with the rest of the radiation of the "reptiles" from the amphibians, pelycosaurs and "mammal like reptiles" - this is another evolutionary radiation the details of which are simply not clear from the fossil record) ; both existed through a gradual rise in oxygen levels until a peak in the Early Cretaceous, then through a decline in the Middle and Late Cretaceous. And their relative diversities didn't change in a concerted manner through that (as best we can tell through the filter of the fossil record).

In short, modest changes in oxygen levels (between about 12 and 25% v/v) do not correlate with changes in populations of animals. Since the Carboniferous, the atmospheric oxygen level hasn't gone outside that range.