RE: Extinction scenarios

[Randy King <randyk@ims.com>]

At 10:32 PM 8/22/98 -0500, Augustus T. White wrote:
>
>2) I know even less about paleobotany than paleoecology.  However, I think 
>rain forests in particular are a more recent development.  The Cretaceous 
>landscape was, as I understand it, considerably more open than even 
>conventional forest land today.  Working backwards from dinos, this makes 
>sense.  Bunches of dinosaurs were bipedal, and the bipedal habit makes the 
>most sense in open, dry biomes.
>

Wouldn't this argument really be circular?  Arid landscapes provide a 
better environment for producing fossils, so we observe it better.  This
doesn't mean that wet enviroments didn't exist.  Is there any information
indicating the entire world was similar?

-Randy