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New Theory Suggests Dinosaurs Were Already Dying When Asteroid Hit (phys.org)
The new "biotic revenge hypothesis" suggests that dinosaurs were killed off by toxic plants. (And an inability to recognize the taste of a toxic plant.) the gmr summarizes a new paper reported at Phys.org:
The dinosaur population had been drastically decreasing before the asteroid impact, [and] the appearance of the first flowering plants -- angiosperms -- in the fossil record coincides with the gradual disappearance of the dinosaurs... The scientists concluded that though the asteroid played a role in the extinction of dinosaurs, the "plants had already placed severe strain on the species."
Crocodiles (believed to be descended from dinosaurs) also can't recognize the taste of toxic plants -- the researchers tested 10 different species. And they point out that not only did dinosaurs start to disappear before the asteroid impact -- they continued to "gradually disappear for millions of years afterward."
Crocodiles (believed to be descended from dinosaurs) also can't recognize the taste of toxic plants -- the researchers tested 10 different species. And they point out that not only did dinosaurs start to disappear before the asteroid impact -- they continued to "gradually disappear for millions of years afterward."
WOW! Someone made up more stupid RANDOM TRASH, but if we pass it as a NEW THEORY, we can sell more adclicks!
-=BeauHD=-
Well...
They were alive, so they were dying. Seems obvious to me.
aren't we?
A quick quote from Wikipedia,
As such, birds were the only dinosaur lineage to survive the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.
Crocodiles are not decedents of dinosaurs - they are reptiles. If this paper can not even see this then I can not put much weight into their theory.
I wonder if birds can taste the toxins then, since they're descended from dinosaurs and survived, though apparently at their worst they were down to a fairly small population on a remote island somewhere. (Can't remember where I read that...)
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Dinosaurs are not extinct. Over the past few decades, research showed that birds are closely related to dinosaurs. They are directly descended from theropods and are now classified as dinosaurs. Scientists now classify birds as feathered dinosaurs and, as a result, that means dinosaurs never went extinct. It's certainly reasonable that the populations of many dinosaurs were already declining prior to the asteroid impact, and it's plausible that toxic plants may have contributed to this. It is somewhat remarkable to me that dinosaurs would not have adapted and evolved to recognize and avoid toxic plants. Perhaps that would have happened were it not for the asteroid impact, and avian ancestors were better suited to the strains put on dinosaur populations. Regardless, it's incorrect to say that dinosaurs are extinct. Because birds are classified as dinosaurs, they most certainly are not extinct.
"Crocodiles (believed to be descended from dinosaurs) also can't recognize the taste of toxic plants..."
Are you fucking kidding me!!!???
They are strict carnivores! Why in hell they would give a damn about a plant, toxic or otherwise!?
Ooooh! but they tested (so they say) about crocodillian ability to discern toxic food (not only plants)... Crocodillians come from a lineage about 200M year old -they haven't find ANY damn thing that makes them real sick so, why they should bother!?
Stuff that matter, they say...
Cf Anne Elk's theory.
they were too big to fit on the arc so they went extincts bigger than giraffe
The raptors are winning, they push us back at every turn. Our losses are enormous. It looks like our only chance for victory now is our new iridium bomb. I only hope our scientists know what they are doing.
There's a theory that dinosaurs were wiped out because a certain virus that lowered birth-rates significantly became widespread. The virus migrated to some mammal species and today about 10% of humans have it.
The world is only 2018 years old. Seriously, just look at a calendar for proof.
I'll wait for experimental conformation of this theory's predictions.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
There weren't no history book writers 4500 years ago, when Dino, and Fred, and Wilma, and the rest, were around. This is just made up news.
The article doesn't claim that the decline of dinosaurs is a new theory. The fossil record clearly shows that dinosaurs were already on the decline before and died out well after Chicxulub. The asteroid contributed, but it was only one of several reasons for their extinction.
All the birds we see today are the descendants of the dinosaurs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... then I can not put much weight into their theory.
Ahhh, c'mon. The Dinos are all dead, SOMETHING killed them. Asteroids, meteors, tar magnets, poisonous plants, global warming, SOMETHING. It's a heavy subject. So what if they got a few supporting things wrong? It's almost like you doubt their conclusions or something. If it feels right, it IS right -- right?
After all, everyone knows THIS is what actually happened.,
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
This may (although it doesn't, really) explain the decline of dinosaurs, but it says nothing about why thousands of other species (including all the ammonites) went extinct at the same time.
And the theory that dinosaurs were already dying off before the K/Pg boundary is hardly new. Part of that is an artifact of how fossils are formed and found. A species could have lasted several million years after its latest-known fossil, it just didn't happen to leave any fossils that have yet been found. (Conversely, the last surviving member of a species could have been fossilized. Unlikely though, except in the case of a mass extinction event.)
-- Alastair
And they point out that not only did dinosaurs start to disappear before the asteroid impact -- they continued to "gradually disappear for millions of years afterward."
If dinosaurs survived for millions of years after the asteroid impact, then very clearly the impact did not kill them. The asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs any more than the Black Death killed humanity. No, Trump will kill humanity. Trump will kill us dead. Trump!
There's zero evidence that dinosaurs existed after the asteroid. The article referred to by Slashdot, the Biotic Revenge Hypotheses has this citation for their "continued to survive" claim:
Sakamoto, M., Benton, M.J., and C. Venditti. 2016. Dinosaurs in decline tens of millions of years before their final extinction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(18):5036–5040
But the Sakamoto article says this about that: "The fossil record shows that dinosaurs existed to the K-Pg boundary but did not survive into the Cenozoic"
So, bzzzzt wrong answer.
see here. Haven't you ever seen a dog eat grass?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Anyone know if florists will deliver to Congress?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
First the Earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. [McCroskey walks off] And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it- [Jacobs turns and starts to walk away, continuing to speak, trailing off as he gets further from the camera] he took her best summer dress and he put it on and went to town...
Galileo's Square-Cube Law appears to work for all land-walking animals alive today, but the scientific community seems to ignore its problematic application to the dinosaurs. Is it because there would seem to be a number of dinosaurs which could not seemingly exist in today's gravity?
Something additional to note is the common occurrence of serious bone diseases such as osteoporosis and arthritis observed in mammoth remains, for this could be called a vindication for the idea that mammoths existed at the very edge of the Square-Cube Law, or that a change in gravity is part of what destroyed them. There's additional discussion of the situation here
Except there's this one. I had forgotten about it due to the thought that a single bone is more likely to be a re-buried bone, and also because I forget a lot of stuff lately. Decide for yourself.
http://palaeo-electronica.org/...
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/201...
"There's zero evidence that dinosaurs existed after the asteroid"
Not zero. There's rather a lot of dinosaur material in early Paleocene strata in North America. The issue is whether it is (all) reworked from underlying cretaceous strata. In particular, a lot a folks think the saurian remains in the Ojo Alamo Formation in New Mexico are Paleocene . However, to my knowledge, no one has yet found an articulated Paleocene dinosaur skeleton. If articulated material is ever found, that'll probably settle the argument.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Theories = / = Fact. We can only guess what happened millions of years ago, yet, we seem to take things as fact without proper evidence.
We can't prove or disprove how something was that far back unless someone has invented the ability to time travel to investigate.
For all we know, velociraptors could jabe been as smart as humans, spoke a language like us, and were perhaps a peaceful species.
I know someone reading this will think "Yeah, like they spoke a language." but you couldn't disprove it and I couldn't prove it either.
*shrug* I just find it weird that people give a theory to something and it somehow becomes a fact with no way to prove/disprove.
So the Loch Ness Monster could be a dinosaur is what you are saying.
This is a case where it's difficult to be specific, because the evidence is scant. If you're only getting one good fossil per thousand years, detecting a decline is dubious. But it does seem that some species of dinosaur were already in decline. And others weren't. A few appear to have been flourishing.
OTOH, accepted theory as of a few years ago is that birds are not descended from dinosaurs, they descend from a line that branched off before the dinosaurs separated from the rest of the reptiles. The ornithiscian dinosaurs had similar hips, but were not ancestral to birds. Neither were birds ancestral to the ornithiscians. They both descend from an earlier ancestor.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They are probably dying because of all the carbon they were producing through their industrialization, and due to dwindling resources, ended up having a nuclear war and wiped themselves out.
I'm pretty sure crocodiles are carnivores. What evolutionary need would they have for being able to detect toxic plants?
They really suck at climbing trees also, I don't think they have any chances at surviving another 64 million years.
You seem to have run into some confusion.
It is true that birds are not descended from ornithischian dinosaurs. But birds are descended from dinosaurs. The birds are descendants of the theropods, traditionally classed as one of the major divisions of saurischians.
(There is a recent suggestion that a reclassification is necessary, that most theropods are actually closer-related to the ornithischians than the rest of the saurischians. But either way, birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs while not being descended from the ornithischians.)
Given that the vast majority of dinosaurs were already extinct by that period, I'd say there's a good chance the effects of that asteroid are somewhat over-stated.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
My regards to Childeric.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
They might want to rename the divisions too, as birds not being descended from the bird-hipped group looks somewhat silly now.
And they point out that not only did dinosaurs start to disappear before the asteroid impact -- they continued to "gradually disappear for millions of years afterward."
If dinosaurs survived for millions of years after the asteroid impact, then very clearly the impact did not kill them. The asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs any more than the Black Death killed humanity. No, Trump will kill humanity. Trump will kill us dead. Trump!
There's zero evidence that dinosaurs existed after the asteroid.
What about Trump?
see here. Haven't you ever seen a dog eat grass?
Dogs have evolved to be omnivores.
This includes 1.5 tonne monstrosities like Yutyrannus Huali, (related to Tyranosaurous Rex) https://news.nationalgeographi...
Discoveries and detailed analysis of recent dinosaur fossils indicate that they were covered with feathers long before flight evolved. And they are now believed to have been warm-blooded. this is confirmed by CT scans of well-preserved fossils (e.g. 600 pound herbivore) showing a 4-chambered heart with *ONE* aorta http://contenidopatrocinado.cn... This is a physiological sign of a warm blooded animal.
So dinosaurs had feathers and were warm blooded. Birds have feathers and are warm blooded. Birds are one group of dinosaurs that survived the asteroid. This was probably due to small size and being able to scavenge scarce food right after the impact.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
No, thank you. I'm not a Trump supporter.
Come to think of it, I think that is what I'll call my jock strap, from now on - a "Trump supporter".
Once upon a time, there was all the time in the world.
The human race rested comfortably for millennia in warm nests of tales that the world had been created especially for us, and later science stepped in to supplant this quaint notion with immeasurable expanses of geologic time in which a rich compost of academic theory might take root and prosper. Everything that had come before us had made way for us, dinosaurs died so that we might live. Children calmed their nightmares with this simple idea after they had been overcome with excitement and terror at the sight of massive skeletons. They could rest easily from some vague sense that nature takes turns ... and this is our turn.
But we now know exactly what the dinosaurs had been doing all those millions of years, practically speaking. Eating and roaring and fucking yes, but also... just biding their time until an asteroid came along to kill them all, not doing enough to prevent it.
That is true for us also up to now. The first stage to mitigate an existential threat is conscious awareness of the threat, and dinosaurs had not developed that far.
We reached that point millennia ago and should have known better, as chance witness of meteors spun into great tales of heavenly vengeance. No doubt if I as a modern thinker appeared in their midst claiming these are just rocks and ice in the sky and we must get cracking to send our own things into the heavens to spot them early and destroy them before they destroy us, I'd be sacrificed to appease to the gods they had conjured. Because people would rather spend a morning in church to be granted snake-oil absolution and get on with their lives, than launch a space program.
But we know now what the human race has been doing for millennia, practically speaking. Eating and warring and building empires and exploring and fucking yes, but also... just biding our time until an asteroid comes along to kill us all, not doing enough to prevent it.
Then the Darwinian stuffed shirts arose with the Industrial Revolution to insult Negroes and Neanderthals, and Jules Verne went ballistic on space travel and other ideas. We visited the Moon before we could, extended imaginary railroads into the sky, explored the oceans in thought before we could in practice, fancied canals on Mars and played with the idea that our conquest of Earth was complete. But tucked away in a steamer-trunk were those Old Time Religion apocalyptic visions of catastrophe. The finest minds of the era failed to combine mass and kinetic energy and some parlor-game estimate of celestial composition into a sense of urgency. For the first time -- if we had focused our efforts to meet some heavenly threat -- we might have gotten a 100 year jump-start. But by now there was this odd popular notion that meteors are a 'known phenomenon' with some mysterious upper bound as to size. Celestial entertainment.
All through the Industrial Revolution, practically speaking, more eating and warring and harnessing the electron and fucking and yes ... biding more time until an asteroid comes along to kill us all, not doing enough to prevent it.
Then the 20th Century exploded in our faces. We conquered mass and energy, even dinner napkins could hold simple equations to unleash devastation formerly reserved for gods. Optics and electrons revealed distant wonders. The skies shown with greater resolution than ever before and the clockwork solar system of Copernicus gave way to a gritty mishmash of colliding and bouncing objects on every scale that would confound later computer models. It was easy to see that flecks and small pieces of this model are inevitably bound to intersect Earth, some massive, but there was too much distraction from fascinating wars and suburbia to bother. Meteors were still small... hadn't they always been? And now we could make big booms and dwelled with pride, boorishly tossing off the 'Hiroshima' as a unit of m
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Dinosaurs were changing with their environments for many millions of years and suddenly they all got poisoned? I don't buy it. I suggest it has more to do with the rise of mammals. Perhaps mammals were destroying their ground-based nests, eating their eggs. It would give impetus to a move into the trees. Those who moved survived to this day as birds. Those who didn't became extinct. Further, notice where many birds go to have land-based nests. These locations are usually far and desolate to protect against predators -- mammals.
E Proelio Veritas.
You sure about that? When I studied it (well, informally) birds were said to have branched off before the dinosaurs were a separate group. Sort of like the Pterosaurs, which also branched off before the dinosaurs had separated.
OTOH, all these recent fossils with feathers may have caused people to reorganize things.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They all just got disinterested in sex
Would you fuck a dinosaur?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Childeric says hello, and also he says you owe him $48.15 because you snuck out before the bar tab was closed.
I say kudos to you. I never got anything over on him.
There's plenty of evidence that they existed after Chicxulub: notably the fact that they still exist today. I see them flying around every day.
Did not know that? Also how do they test to see if the crocs can recognize the taste of toxic flowering plants? Force feed them and see if they spit them out?
Just a weird thing to read ...
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
For once, Alabama law agrees with science.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This comment wins the thread!
Topical, relevant, and funny as well. A true LQIAW (Laughing Quietly Inside, At Work) moment there!
It claims we can conclude that dinosaurs didn't develop an aversion to foods that make them sick based on the fact that caimans (which have a common ancestor) don't.
Can we therefore conclude that pterosaurs didn't fly based on the fact that caimans don't?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, he's sure about that, the birds being dinosaurs theory/consensus is relatively new. I was taught the same thing as you were... about 30-40 years ago, back when few even thought dinosaurs had feathers. The theory birds were descendants of theropods, while not new, has grown stronger since then to the point it's pretty much now the scientific consensus.
The current Wikipedia page on the subject does a reasonable job of describing the current situation, and is well cited (you don't have to rely upon the editors biases!) if you want to take a look.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.