Re:

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jomana Moss" <eustacia1@mail.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 02, 2002 4:09 AM


Welcome to the list... now that my internet connection works again, I'll try
to answer:

> [...] the following MIGHT be true:
>
> 1. Dinosaurs were susceptible to viruses, like most warm-blooded animals.

Aren't there viruses for _everything_? I mean,
www.at.embnet.org/gem/research/Witte/witte.html leads one to suspect every
organism can catch a virus?

> 2. A level-4-type "dinosaurian" virus may have evolved and infected the
dinosaurs, explaining the already-in-process decline of the dinosaurs before
the asteroid crash, and explaining the rapidity of their final demise.

The problem here is, IMNSHO, that you try to explain the extinction of the
dinosaurs. Yeah, right. :-) Why did the ammonites die out? The rudists and
the inoceramids? Heaps of foraminifera and haptophytes*?

* Coccolithophorida -- the calcareous nannoplankton that chalk is largely
made of -- belong in here.

> 3. The cold-bloods survived this outbreak because reptiles do not get
mammalian viruses.

So did the warm-blooded Neornithes, but not any other bird (except,
depending on the phylogeny, Lithornithiformes, which is either in Neornithes
or its sister group).

> I've always thought of frogs and toads as the "canary in the coal mine" so
to speak.

Somewhere in the archives it says that frogs survived Mt. St. Helens. So
maybe their survival is not so unexpected.

> Thank you so much for considering my thoughts, and I would love to hear
feedback from any or all of you!

You would not love to hear feedback from all hundreds of us :-)