Scientists Say The Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Almost Wiped Us Out Too (theweek.com) 265
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."
summary is incorrect (Score:2, Funny)
That is totally not how things went down. [dinosaurusrex.ca]
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That's not right either. This is how it really happened [youtube.com].
Was this before or after (Score:5, Funny)
We got off the ark?
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Hah! No-one is gullible enough to still believe such nonsense are they?
Re:Was this before or after (Score:5, Informative)
At least half of the American voters do! Why are you insulting them?!
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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.
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
So an omnipotent, omniscient being popping out of nothing then crafting us like playdough makes more sense?
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have facebook contacts that seriously promote a flat earth...
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I have facebook contacts that seriously promote a flat earth...
... held up by 4 elephants...
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Hah! No-one is gullible enough to still believe such nonsense are they?
The B-Ark [everything2.com] seems unlikely to you?
All aboard! (Score:2)
Saw an ad for this on TV the other day:
https://arkencounter.com/ [arkencounter.com] ...and was like wtf?!
Boggles the mind.
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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
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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.
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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... [answersingenesis.org]
but yeah Meteor or Flood i would bet that 90% of the species (hint "kind" is not species) g
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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.
Nothing surprising here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Nothing surprising here (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] died out.
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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.
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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 t
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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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
>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.
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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.
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Horseshoe crab blood powder derivitive is used to determine if vaccines are tainted by bacteria.
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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 bacteri
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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 th
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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 define
Re:Nothing surprising here (Score:5, Informative)
>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.
90% of dinosaurs survived? (Score:2, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:90% of dinosaurs survived? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Believe it or not, the meanings of words change with time.
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So we can start calling magazines clips now?
Yes if you are using Latin. :-)
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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.
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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
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And "official" dictionary meaning? Oooooh boy, we've got a live one here!
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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 amoun
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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.
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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? (Score:4, Informative)
Please take your argument to Oxford [oxforddictionaries.com]...
Although I suspect you won't get very far with it there.
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Oh you poor prescriptive fool. That boat sailed a long time ago.
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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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfao urum gyltendum, you modern English-speaking bastard.
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A 10-way orgy?
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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
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Please. Sheldon would not have been obnoxious and obtuse. Sheldon would have been obnoxious, obtuse, and correct.
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Do it correctly.
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"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.
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According to OED, you are incorrect about decimate (Score:2)
http://blog.oxforddictionaries... [oxforddictionaries.com]
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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.
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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
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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". :-)
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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? (Score:5, Funny)
You are all wrong (Score:2)
European animals were decimated, american ones were inchimated.
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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.
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Sigh. http://blog.oxforddictionaries... [oxforddictionaries.com]
"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 Etymologi
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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.
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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.
Brontosaurus? (Score:2)
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!'?
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Well, damn! My inner nine-year-old is rather pleased and doing his 'I told you so!' dance in my current self's direction.
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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.
I have nothing to contribute this time, sorry (Score:2)
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?!"
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Why have cavemen when you can have futuristic soldiers equipping dinos with laser guns [wikipedia.org]?
Switching positions twice (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [twimg.com], 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 (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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And the surviving dinosaurs are definitely warm blooded.
"Possum-sized"?! (Score:2)
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.
Scientists say (Score:2)
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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/... [cnn.com]
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 tel
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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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
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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
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Please don't confuse science with media coverage of science.
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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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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/dino
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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.
Spea
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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.
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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!!!
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I turn 40 on my next birthday
No doubt you're a 40 year old virgin.
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For example, climate change.
So do anonymous cowards.