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Did Insects Kill the Dinosaurs?
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 04, 2008 01:25 PM
from the big-and-little dept.
from the big-and-little dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Asteroid impacts, massive volcanic flows, and now biting, disease-carrying insects have been put forward as an important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs. In the Late Cretaceous the world was covered with warm-temperate to tropical areas that swarmed with blood-sucking insects. A theory explored by researchers at Oregon State suggests these bugs carried leishmania, malaria, intestinal parasites, arboviruses and other pathogens. Repeated epidemics may have slowly-but-surely worn down dinosaur populations while ticks, mites, lice and biting flies tormented and weakened them. 'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.' The confluence of new insect-spread diseases, loss of traditional food sources, and competition for plants by insect pests could all have provided a lingering, debilitating condition that dinosaurs were ultimately unable to overcome."
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Mosquitos (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Seems odd (Score:4, Insightful)
They were new? I am by no means an authority on the subject, but from what I remember learning about evolution, one-celled-organisms came along before cell colonies. Further, small cell colonies (bugs and such) came around before big ones (dinosaurs and such). I even recall learning that the first self-replicating DNA strands were much more virus-like than bacteria-like...since the whole membrane and organelle system didn't come about until a bit later.
So, by the time the dinosaurs were around, the world should have already been densely populated with viruses, bacteria, and small bugs which could find the guts of a dinosaur to be fertile breeding grounds.
I really don't see how these things, and the diseases they cause, could have come around after the fact. Maybe some more sinister versions of them, more specifically targeted at the dinosaurs of the day, came around after the fact, but I don't think that alone would account for a mass extinction.
If you have corrections to offer, don't hold back (not that you would).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They were not claiming that these diseases did not exist until this time. They are saying that the diseases adapted to insects and used the insects as carrying agents at far back as the cretaceous period, maybe longer.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, since insects had been *The* animal ecosystem on land for millions of years before the first vertebrates skulked out of the ocean, it's pretty plausible that all manner of mites and parasites had existed and passed around proto-diseases--lets not forget that even today, our insects are covered with even tinier insect parasites. Parasites of all sorts also existed in the oceans where the vertebrates were evolving. Parallel evolution makes much, much more sense.
Insects (Score:3, Interesting)
The vast majority of flowers are intended to attract insects. Think about the most notorious disease-sp
extremely suspect (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:extremely suspect (Score:5, Informative)
Sharks are sharks, Ceolocanths are fish, and Aligators are reptiles. Although all three forms date back very nearly how they look now to the time of the dinosaurs, it would be an equivocation to call them "dinosaurs" when discussing the "extinction of the dinoasurs".
Apologies for spelling, mine is pretty poor.
Parent
Re:extremely suspect (Score:5, Informative)
Triceratops wasn't a sauropod. Like other marginocephalians, it was a member of one of three orithischian (bird hipped) groups (the other two are threophora which includes armoured dinosaurs such as ankylosaurus and stegosaurus, and ornithopods such as the hadrosaurs). Sauropods were saurischian (lizard hipped), and are therefore more closely related to therapods than either are to the ornithischians.
Parent
Re:extremely suspect (Score:4, Funny)
Ow...that post hurt my head. Someone left the door unlocked and a paleontologist got in!!??
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Doesn't he know that Slashdot is only for armchair experts, not actual ones?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:extremely suspect (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Same old error, again and again. (Score:2)
Why can't people understand, birds are the dinosaurs that survived.
Birds relate to dinosaurs as bats relate to mammals. Or, birds relate to dinosaurs as butterflies relate to insects. It is as simple as that.
That, unread, article must be bad.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, but that was an example of the common misconception I was trying to point out. Contrary to your proposal, birds _are_ a group of species of dinosaurs.
If all mammals, except the bats for example, went extinct, your favorite bat would not seize or stop being a mammal. And the number of very specific adaptations of the bats would NOT set them apart (sonar, leathery wings, wrinkled noses, large ears,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No wonder they're all dead (Score:2, Funny)
and all within the past 6000 years...
the first lawyer was probably the deathknell.
Re:extremely suspect (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, it is unlikely that biting insects could be responsible for all this chaos. The extinction was simultaneous, worldwide, and (in geological terms) instantaneous, it hit animals and plants, and it hit organisms on land and in the sea. Now, it turns out, probably not coincidentally, that at the same time all of this happens, a huge asteroid or comet impact- one of the biggest in the past half-billion years- takes place in the Yucatan, blasting dust into the stratosphere, sending tidal waves across Texas, and probably igniting much of North America in the process. An asteroid impact is probably capable of causing an extinction like this. Its doubtful that gnats, mites, and mosquitos could.
Parent
Uh... all of the above (Score:5, Funny)
Butterflies, specifically (Score:4, Funny)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000#Future_War [wikiquote.org]
Thank you for not killing me.
MalaRIAA (Score:5, Funny)
Is this another Music Industry article?
I don't buy it (Score:2)
Parasites didn't materialize from nowhere (Score:2)
What nixes this idea for me is that the microbes didn't grow on Mars and suddenly rain on the dinosaurs out of the blue. Microbes and reptiles all had to grow up together.
Bernard Werber (Score:4, Interesting)
But frankly, I don't think new diseases would wipe out an entire order of life, all over the world, in all ecological niches, without wiping out other unrelated orders of life. In their hundreds of millions of years of existence, dinos had to fight off insects and diseases that were there before them, it couldn't just wipe them (and just them) off the face of the Earth in such a short time.
Hold the phone (Score:2)
'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.'
Uh, exactly why would mammals have some natural resistance to these diseases such that they would survive better than the dinosaurs? Especially considering that some mammals (e.g., humans) don't have resistance to Mala
Re:Hold the phone (Score:4, Interesting)
And yes, there are a number of genes that code for malaria resistance in human beings; they exist wherever malaria is common. The most well known (and most common?) is the sickle cell gene. But there are a number of other mechanisms that have evolved independently that protect people from malaria. If your ancestors had a lot of trouble with malaria, you are probably much more resistant to it than someone whose ancestors came from Norway.
Parent
poor understanding of evolution and parasites (Score:4, Insightful)
they gradually evolve in tandem with their hosts, and they make sure they always leach off the host's resources, and never kill their host
a parasite is not interested in killing its host. because then the parasite dies too
and a parasite is evolved to infect its host very carefully and specifically. dinosaurs did not suddenly get worms that no other creature ever got before. the worms evolved as the dinosaurs evolved
as for biting insects, this was a major new change. but again, it's not like mosquitoes materialized out of thin air and vampirically drained all the blood in the world. they slowly and gradually evolved to the job they do better and better, but never THAT good a job. never, never, did they kill their hosts. because this would then kill the mosquitoes
so frankly, this story is braindead on some fundamentals of evolution and parasites
Re:poor understanding of evolution and parasites (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
so are you telling me (Score:2)
of course not
therefore, you understand my point of the supidity of saying parasites wiped out the dinosaurs
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A Parasite that develops and is virulent enough to wipe out its host species will go extinct as a result of doing so. An evolutionary dead end, certainly, but undoubtedly an evolutionary dead-end that has occurred more than once in earthly history. Nothing and no one will step in to prevent this from happening (well, at least in my theology).
In that sense, a "successful" parasite is relat
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well no, current species of parasitic wasps aren't generally going to; however that's just because the ones that survived up until now are the ones that stumbled upon a method that leaves a host population in tact. This doesn't mean that previous parasites didn't get overzealous and bring about their own extinction by killing all their hosts.
There's nothing about evolution which inherently prevents a species from ending itself...you just don't encounte
Re:poor understanding of evolution and parasites (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
I Dunno (Score:2)
Still, lots of stuff did survive, and because "dinosaur" is a rather large and diverse group of animals, the best we can say is that it was, by and large, the megafauna that took the brunt of it, which seems logical, as it would be these species that would be at the top of their prospective ecological niches, and thus the most vulnerable.
id (Score:4, Funny)
i mean swarms of insects were mentioned in the bible (old testament, moses exodus part?) somewhere, i dont remember reading about asteroids in that book
Genesis 19:24 (Score:2)
The insects are just the FALL guys (Score:2)
Doesn't sound likely at all (Score:4, Insightful)
"After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them"
Um, the Cretaceous period lasted 75 million years. So while it's plausible that insects caused outbreaks of disease in localized populations I really don't see how anything of pandemic proportions can be inferred. As far as evolved resistance goes, well, the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for a LONG time. Much, much longer than mammals. Unless the diseases described all appeared about 65 million years ago, then there's just no logic here.
Besides that, dinosarus may have died out but many other species did not. This includes reptiles, which would have been affected by the pathogens according by these researchers.
The more I think about this, the more it smells like bullcrap.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds plausible, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
You might ask what happened Mayan empire? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_collapse [wikipedia.org] This insect thing might not be so far fetched as you think?
Which came first? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a second... (Score:2, Informative)
Possible, But Improbable (Score:2, Informative)
necessary (Score:2, Funny)
Somebody needs a degree (Score:3, Insightful)
Flowering plants originated 70-90 mya too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Two sides of the religous argument (Score:2)
a dinosaur just flew by my window (Score:2)
No, man (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)