RE: mosasaur babies/no marine dinos

[John Bois <jbois@umd5.umd.edu>]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Ronald Orenstein wrote:

> Penguins actually have a broad latitudinal range, from the Equator (the 
> Galapagos Penguin) to the coast of Antarctica.

This falsifies the equatorial barrier hypothesis.  Also, this penguin
species is the subject of a study in extinction in process (I can find the
ref. if needed).  What is apparently happening is that the penguin is OK
until a bad year.  But predation by introduced rats somehow impacts
recovery; the penguins don't bounce back.

> There are certainly plenty of seabird islands in the 
> Northern Hemisphere, some with huge populations (eg the Pribilofs), and in 
> its heyday the extinct and flightless Great Auk, which was quite 
> penguin-like, had large breeding colonies at numerous sites on both sides 
> of the North Atlantic.

But not a polar continental land mass free of mammals.  A relationship
exists between the area of a land mass and the diversity of its
species.  Penguins are diverse, auks not--was this the case always?  Are
you suggesting that auks were as specialized/derived as penguins?