Re: The K-T boundary in Nanxiong

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

Nick Longrich said:
> Re: Elephant bird eggs, it is very common to find elephant bird
> eggshell on the beaches in Southwest Madagascar, one can pick up
> literally hundreds of pieces in an hour in some places. Some of the
> stuff is porous and subfossil, other stuff is hard and permineralized.
> The porous stuff comes out of the dunes, the permineralized stuff seems
> to come out of old shell-rich beach conglomerates. So somewhere there
> are probably 21st century deposits forming which are fairly rich in the
> eggshell of long-extinct birds.

OK.  So this is reworking...a common enough process for sure.  And a very
nice example, too.  Any idea why these shells are in the Southwest?  Did the
birds live only in the SW?

> People of all kinds of scientific
> background and preconcieved notions have been looking for fossils in
> these sediments, it seems like they should have found dinosaurs
> already... if in fact any such skeletons did exist.

I wouldn't think so.  They may have become extinct locally at different
rates.  Depending upon what happened to them, they may have taken a big hit,
and lingered on for a while in, for example, a few relict populations.  Does
any hypothesis predict total, instant, annihilation?  Why wouldn't a
bolide
spare a species or two in some remote valley?  Given the gross survival of
other clades, it has to be more likely than not that a couple of species
_did_ survive.  But the chance of finding something like this could be very
small.
Comments (not Nick's) that claims of Lazarus Dinosaurs are far fetched, are
misguided.  It would be much easier to convince an alien biologist of the
possibility of relict populations than of a total surgical instant excision
of a diverse taxon.