Re: CROCODILE ?MYTHS?

["Nicholas R. Longrich" <longrich@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

On Tue, 23 Jan 1996, Jeffrey Martz wrote:

> 
> > Will someone *please* ask Bakker _why_ he thinks that _Utahraptor_ 
> > originated
> > in Mongolia? In Raptor Red he says that the characters in the book actually 
> > grew
> > up in Mongolia, and, within their lifetime, spread across Beringia. He also
> > reckons that the giant dromaeosaurs reported recently from Asia are 
> > utahraptors
> > too, but he adds that _Utahraptor_ spread westwards _back_ into Asia - I 
> > know
> > this is fiction, but he must have some evidence in mind. If so, we could 
> > never
> > know whether an Asian utahraptor was a ancestor of an American species 
> > (before
> > spreading east) or a later immigrant from an ancestral American species. 
> > Help!
> 
>     I suspect that was just for the story's sake.

        Unfortunately, no. It's not just for the story, I believe that it 
is an attempt to describe how extinctions could result from contact 
between previously isolated populations of dinosaurs: i.e. his ideas 
about dinosaurs coming into competition, spreading diseases to each 
other, etc. and thereby causing ectinctions. I haven't read the book, but 
I read an article which I think was actually an excerpt from it.
        Personally, I think the theory is completely untenable, at least 
as an explanation of the K-T extinctions. For one, you've got animals 
close enough to each other to be put into the same genus (at least by 
some authors) or else that bear strong resemblences to each other, on
both sides of the Bering from a few million years prior 
to the K-T extinctions- Saurolophus, T rex and bataar, Velociraptor, 
Edmontosaurus and Shantungosaurus, etc. For another, anybody who knows 
anything about epidemiology can tell you that postulating disease as the 
cause of the K-T extinction, or, for that matter, the Pleistocene 
extinction, is, to use strict scientific terms, a bunch of hooey.

        -nick L.