Maybe It Wasn't The Meteor, After All 48
An anonymous reader writes "In one new argument, David Penny of Massey University in New Zealand and Matt Phillips from the University of Oxford contend the fossil record and the evolution of animals through modern times suggest the demise of dinosaurs began several million years before the catastrophic asteroid collision.
'"We agree completely with the geophysicists that an extraterrestrial impact marks the end of the Cretaceous," said Penny, in a statement reported in newspapers and on the Internet this week. "But after 25 years [scientists] have still not provided a single piece of evidence that this was the primary reason for the decline of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs."'"
So finally my theory is proved correct (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe It Wasn't The Meteor, After All (Score:3, Funny)
No, it was Colonel Mustard (Score:1)
Death of the dinosaurs (Score:1)
The Earth was a lot younger then. I think it is a more acurate theory that a meteor Impact simply aided the final stages of extinction.
Re:Death of the dinosaurs (Score:4, Informative)
It was in fact..... (Score:3, Funny)
As every fan of the classic science fiction series Doctor Who [bbc.co.uk] knows the Dinosaurs were actually wiped out when a star freighter impacted into the earth.
This was all part of a Cyberman plot to destroy the earth. This story was also notable in that they finally managed to get rid of Adric, possibly the 2nd most annoying boy genius in the history of SciFi (just after Wesley Crusher). Adric had the decency to die heroically so avoided first place :-)
For more information see the episode guide for Earth Shock [bbc.co.uk]
Re:It was in fact..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It was in fact..... (Score:3, Insightful)
> Boy I sure hope Wil Wheaton is not reading Slashdot today :)
If I said Hannibal Lector was the most evil and chilling character in the history of film no one would consider that to be an insult to Mr Hopkins but instead a complement on his acting skills.
Please, no one say Wesley was supposed to be likeable or I'm in deep trouble :-)
Re:It was in fact..... (Score:2)
Weasley got a bit better in the later episodes, though. Especially in the 7th season!
[just checking - he
I wonder if Will does read this if he will mention it on his website?
T.
Non sequitur (Score:5, Informative)
People much smarter than you [ucla.edu] already determined that the K-T boundary is uniformly deposited (in terms of time) across the earth, no matter which craton you examine, and it occurs at the same point in time as a significant biomass die-off.
This indicates that a extreme amount of dust and ash must've been airborne for many years, blocking much of the sunlight that would normally enable plant life to flourish. While it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were in decline prior to this time, the event that killed them is the same one that ultimately created the K-T.
Re:Non sequitur (Score:2)
Re:Non sequitur (Score:4, Insightful)
This indicates that a extreme amount of dust and ash must've been airborne for many years, blocking much of the sunlight that would normally enable plant life to flourish. While it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were in decline prior to this time, the event that killed them is the same one that ultimately created the K-T.
Oddly enough though, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish survived...
Yet both the bird-hipped and regular-hipped dinosaurs died, pterodactyls were wiped out, and the marine dinosaurs also died.
The meteor probably had a large influence, but I think the actual story is more complicated than "the meteor hit the earth and all of dinosauria decided to die, along with a few related species"
Re:Non sequitur (Score:1)
Re:Non sequitur (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that the survival thing largely comes down to "dinosaurs big, other critters small" rather than being anything very complicated.
The smallest sized dinosaur was chicken-sized, that we know of. A quick google search indicates that a larger crocodile survived the big extinction.
Re:Non sequitur (Score:1)
Re:Non sequitur (Score:1)
Re:Non sequitur (Score:1)
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/SIC/impact_cratering/Ch icxulub/Discovering_crater.html [arizona.edu]
Re:Non sequitur (Score:1)
Re:Non sequitur (Score:2)
Declines and Ends (Score:3, Insightful)
And there's declines, and consolidations. There used to be more primate species on earth, now there are fewer -- are they in decline? Tough to say yes, tough to say no. Sure, they're in decline in variation, but not in numbers or population. So I'd like to hear more about what both groups mean by "decline".
Just my 2c.
Sounds Sketchy to Me (Score:5, Informative)
Which isn't to say that it's impossible. But given the trickiness of the data analysis and the odd coincidence of the asteroid impact just then, I'm skeptical.
Re:Extinction level event? (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Extinction level event? (Score:1)
Re:Extinction level event? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know how you can say, "a literal reading of the bible cannot be reconciled with science" when you haven't bothered to even do a Google search regarding your "favorite question."
I think that it would be impossible for anyone to "reconcile" the Bible with science without having an attitude of sincere, intense study of the relevant subjects.
I'll give you a few places you can check out i
Textual Criticism and Interpretations (Score:1)
Don't forget that the meaning of whatever words are used in Hebrew may have changed over time, in connotation if not in denotation.
As well as taking into consideration the text itself, one should remember the historical context of such works.
Re:Textual Criticism and Interpretations (Score:2)
I highly doubt that a fully correct understanding of the Bible would clash with science in any way.
A more apt statement
Re:Extinction level event? (Score:2)
You and so many others completely mistake the original purpose of the Bible's early stories. They are mystical stories, intended as allegories and stories to illustrate a point, or create specific religious responses in the people. They were not considered real in an historical real sense even back then. This factual interpretation of those texts is mostly a Western, recent (in terms of
Re:Extinction level event? (Score:2)
Which creationist viewpoint? The Hopi Indian one? The African !Kung one?
Why do you assume that the Bible's mythology is more worthy of reconciliation with science? Lots of cultures made up stories to explain the origins of earth. They're all interesting, and you can learn quite a bit about their respective cultures from them, but no particular one is more deserving of reconciliation with the reality of existense as discovered by
ohhhh come on (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike the Dinosaurs, some things never die... (Score:4, Interesting)
Most people who have studied the Earth's history of mass extinctions have come to understand a few important points. First, it doesn't appear that bolide impacts are the primary cause of many of them. Second, when mass extinctions occur, they appear to have been the result of several factors acting simultaneously to cause a collapse of the food chain.
At the K-T boundary there were several things going on at once, and they appear to have (together) resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs:
First, the dinosaurs were already in decline in N. America, with most dinosaur populations concentrated in N. America and part of Asia. Major disruptions in the breeding cycle of dinosaurs would have been disasterous.
Second, reconfiguration of the continents was changing the ocean's circulation patterns. This affected climate, ocean temperature, ocean mixing, and most fundamentally ocean productivity.
Third, the dinosaurs weren't the only creatures that went extinct at the KT boundary, lots of things had been in decline, probably due to ongoing climate change & major volcanism...
Fourth, major volcanism was occurring during the end-days of the Cretaceous. High rates of seafloor spreading along a couple major ridges probably changed seawater chemistry, and the Deccan Traps were erupting in the vicinity of Asia. If you're not familiar with the Deccan Traps, imagine 200,000 square miles of volcanic rock a few thousand feet thick -- about 12,000 cubic miles of lava (for reference, that's about half a million times more material than Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980). This would have been a significant stressor affected climate and biosphere; Asian dinosaurs might have been particularly hard hit, but the presence of this large igneous province bws probably not sufficient to collapse the food web and by itself result in the demise of the dinosaurs.
But fifth, on the other side of the globe from the Deccan Traps, a bolide collided with what would become the Yucatan Peninsula. The sedimentary rocks there contained thick anhydrite deposits (that's calcium sulfate) and thick layers of limestone (calcium carbonate). The blast would have rapidly liberated the sulfate and carbon dioxide from those minerals, then thrown billions of tons of particulate matter in to the stratosphere. The particles thrown up from the impact would have blotted out the sun, while the sulfur rained back as sulfuric acid rain (this isn't good for vegatation or aquatic critters). Darkness would have slowed primary photosynthesis, but even after the skies cleared the climate would have been thrown in to chaos: the CO2 liberated from the blast could have caused severe greenhouse warming in the few thousand years after the impact, wreaking yet more biological havoc. I could keep describing various aspects of the chaos that would follow such an impact, but don't think it's really necessary. The impact may not have, by itself, been enough to kill off the dinosaurs, but it must have severely stressed and already severely stressed ecosystem, and following a multi-faceted attack on the base of the food chain, the top macrofauna would have had a rough go of it.
Finally, the impact event is very strongly correlated with the extinction of the dinosaurs; there's very little evidence that any dinosaurs in N. America survived the impact -- to my knowledge, no dinosaur fossils have been found stratigraphically above the iridium layer (there are cases where fossils could have weathered out of Cretaceous strata and been redeposited on younger Tertiary strata, but that's not evidence for the dinos having survived the boundary).
In conclusion, there's no proof that the dinosaurs would have survived had there not been an impact, nor
Not convinced. (Score:4, Interesting)
If conditions, even millions of years prior to the extinction, were so hostile to reptilian life that the dinosaurs were dying out, conditions for millions of years after must've been considerably worse. How, then, have so many reptiles from that time period survived?
Certainly I believe there was a mass extinction, and that it was caused by a sudden event. Sheer dumb luck is all that is required to explain the survival of reptilian life from this time. Luck, though, tends not to hold out over timeframes spanning tens or hundreds of millions of years.
Re:Not convinced. (Score:2)
I've seen a fairly good case made for the dinosaurs being warm-blooded. This means that they required a huge, steady supply of food, which was disrupted by the catastrophe.
A cold-blooded crocodile gets by on a lot less food, since it doesn't heat itself constantly. It just grows more slowly with less food.
Now, mice. Take a brontosaur's mass of mice, say 20,000.
Re:Not convinced. (Score:2)
Take a brontosaur's mass of mice, say 20,000
20000 mice per apatosaur??? Must be some HUGE mice. The size of my cat, perhaps. How about 1,000,000 mice, instead? But the basic idea is sound
Also, for us purists, brontosaur is an invalid designation. Apatosaur is considered correct, since it predates the brontosaur label by some years.
Who knows (Score:1)
Advanced Breathing Systems (Score:1)
A Different Kind of Asteroid.. (Score:1)
Instead of playing find the big crater, maybe we should be playing find the big tunnel in the Earth...
Re:A Different Kind of Asteroid.. (Score:1)