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

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

On Mon, 31 May 2004, Dann Pigdon wrote:

>
>
> Vlad Petnicki wrote:
> >
> > To quote the Jeff Goldblum JP character "life will find
> > a way".  Had there been significant number of dinosaur
> > survivors of those first weeks, would not at least some
> > of them had "found a way" like the surviving critters
> > did?
>
> Extinction isn't about animals dying (everything dies eventually) - it's
> about them not being able to reproduce viably faster than the mortality
> rate.

Yes.  Except that bolide hypothesists expect us to believe it _is_ about
dinosaurs just dying...that they became extinct without first being
endangered.

> Larger animals (in general) are more suceptible to
> inbreeding. Hence a hundred elephants don't have a large enough gene
> pool to survive as a species in the long term, whereas a hundred rats
> can more or less take over the world.

This seems to make sense until one looks at the growth and reproduction
rates of dinosaurs.  These factors may have more in common with rats than
elephants.  For example, ostriches and emus are adult-sized in little more
than a year.  And if a single elephant had as many offspring as an
ostrich, they could brood a whole herd every year!