Mass extinctions

[Scaroth of the Jagaroth]

Very good episode of Robert Winston's religious programme earlier on in the week. He himself is a religious fellow but was completely dismayed by the attitude of the fundamentalist Christians he interviewed whose sole purpose seemed to be to rubbish all of the scientific advances of the last 500 years.

His nice summing up: "surely the meaning of faith is that it is 'in spite of' rather than 'because of'".

[malvolio]

Sorry - I was a biologist in a former existence. Old habits die hard!

[stackpole]

Malvolio, it's an eternity in hell for you, giving a sensible answer like that.

[malvolio]

If you get the equivalent of a nuclear winter and 90% of plant life disappears for three years and you are something that needs half a ton of food a day, you're going to be in a lot more trouble than something that only needs a few ounces. The other potetnial survivors are the lower order genera that tend to be able to hibernate for long periods when there's no food available - hence the survival of the crocodiles for example. Finally, once things start coming back to normal, faster breeding species will fill up the ecological niches first.

[Scaroth of the Jagaroth]

It's all Satan's work. All of this so-called "scientific" claptrap is just to lure the unwary into an afterlife of eternal torment.

Chico.

[DimPrawn]

There's no pattern to the survivors. Some where large, some small. Some were mammals, others were reptiles and birds. Many plants made it, others did not.

[stackpole]

On land I think it was partly anything that could live in a burrow (small mammals and presumably the birds of the time), or get by in shallow hot water (crocs). (I read somewhere that nothing over 18 inches tall survived, although I don't suppose height in itself had anything to do with it, more likely size.) Also, it doesn't explain why the large sea-going reptiles like pleiseosaurs [sp?] perished.

In the dip in temperatures, wasn't being warm-blooded a big help too? Hence mammals.

I thought today's birds evolved from small reptiles, which would better fit your theory because small reptiles were more likely to be burrowers than the birds of the time.

As for pleiseosaurs, perhaps the surface sea temperatures dropped too, and because they were air-breathers and had to live near the surface, they died for the same reasons as the land-based ones. Or perhaps the dust from the impact poisoned the surface water for a while.

Doesn't explain crocs though. Maybe they were the only reptiles that weren't allergic to iridium. Ask zeit.

[OwlHoot]

Evidently, the Cretacious-Tertiary mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs, pterosaurs(flying reptiles), many fish, mosasaurs, plants etc, but crocodiles, turtles and lizards, mammals and birds all made it through relatively unscathed.

How come? Climate change? How can climate change select such a diverse set of survivors and such a diverse set of losers?

Perhaps Chico's god wiped them out instead as they had turned to Islam?

Iridium (extremely rare in the Earth's crust, but is much more common in asteroids) is found in abundence in rocks around this time. Is this evidence of alien big game hunters?

The truth is out there.

On land I think it was partly anything that could live in a burrow (small mammals and presumably the birds of the time), or get by in shallow hot water (crocs). (I read somewhere that nothing over 18 inches tall survived, although I don't suppose height in itself had anything to do with it, more likely size.) Also, it doesn't explain why the large sea-going reptiles like pleiseosaurs [sp?] perished.

[AtW]

Yes it was threaded who walked off the path while hunting on dinosaurs in the past.

[wendigo100]

How can climate change select such a diverse set of survivors and such a diverse set of losers?

Ask Arsene Wenger or Alex Ferguson. Fossil fuels are responsible for their teams' demise.

[NoddY]

Don't be absurd, it was all started by these two:



and



all over a:



so says:

[DimPrawn]

Evidently, the Cretacious-Tertiary mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs, pterosaurs(flying reptiles), many fish, mosasaurs, plants etc, but crocodiles, turtles and lizards, mammals and birds all made it through relatively unscathed.

How come? Climate change? How can climate change select such a diverse set of survivors and such a diverse set of losers?

Perhaps Chico's god wiped them out instead as they had turned to Islam?

Iridium (extremely rare in the Earth's crust, but is much more common in asteroids) is found in abundence in rocks around this time. Is this evidence of alien big game hunters?

The truth is out there.