Re: K-T survivors (hadrosaurs?, mammals & birds)

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> This may have perhaps occurred as the
> "fern spike" was beginning, and hadrosaurs would have had it good for a
> while (at least until bad times returned, such as an exploding mammal
> diversity starting to compete for food or consuming hadrosaur babies and
> eggs).

One problem I have with surviving hadrosaurs is the utter lack of evidence
for an explosion in hadrosaur numbers, even if not in the number of their
clades (longer generation times than tiny mammals), in the Paleocene. The
other is how they then died out. Competition from mammals is IMHO very
unlikely, as, apart from multis, herbivorous mammals were just beginning to
evolve, and stayed much smaller than any hadrosaur for a long time. Nest
raiding is just as unlikely for me because there were big carnivorous
mammals like *Didelphodon* before the K-T, and nothing happened to the
hadrosaurs then.