Re: "Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth..."

[Dora Smith <villandra@austin.rr.com>]

That is a very logical explanation of the survival of cold-blooded land
animals.   It just can't be the whole story.   It doesn't explain the odd
pattern to which warm blooded animals survived.

Now, I know that a volcano in Indonesia 65 million years ago came within 100
individuals of driving the human race to extinction.   It appears as if
those individuals must have lived in Africa at the time, as genetic evidence
from modern humans points to an origin in Africa.   That is what one would
expect given that humans did not yet live in the Western hemisphere,
Southern Asia was apparently inhospitable and climactic changes would have
affected Europe and the rest of Asia.

But still it seems a stretch that just one line of coelorusaurian dinosaurs
survived when so many lines had evolved in very similar ways.   Apparently
more than one sort of mammal survived!

These definitions of Aves that have been provided all define the class in
terms of common descent from the unknown nearest common ancestor.   My
question is, how do we know that this nearest common ancestor was far out
some narrow limb of the coelorusaurian family tree?

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, Texas
villandra@austin.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vlad Petnicki" <bucketfoot-al@justice.com>
To: <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
Cc: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2004 11:56 AM
Subject: Re: "Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth..."


> On Sat, 29 May 2004 18:53:41 +0200, David Marjanovic
> wrote:

>
> *Sigh* Cold-blooded animals require much less food
> (crocs can go a year without eating), AND can go into a
> state of a type of HIBERNATION UNDERGROUND.  THAT is
> the most logical reason as to why the cold-blooded
> animals fared much better in the aftermath of KT.
>
>
> > - most if not all small theropods of the time, not
> just
> > birds, had feathers.
>
> See my previous post about those.
>
> _________________________________________________