Re: H1N5 (and Bakker's virus extinction hypothesis) now H5N1

[Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>]

On Sun, 14 May 2006 04:52:08 -0700 paul w sparks <pws@psparks.us> writes:
> Hi dino lovers 
> 
> It seems to me that to discuss what may have happened to the dino's 
> doesn't make much sense until you first examine how the whole animal 
> world was decimated at the same time.

Well, I'd have to disagree.  It is advantageous to falsify very specific
hypotheses, such as Bakker's "virus" dino extinction idea.

Bakker's hypothesis is dino-centric.  That, in itself, makes it unlikely,
as you have noted.  But if H5N1, a highly virulent and deadly pandemic
strain, kills only certain taxa within a small clade (Aves), leaving
other taxa in the clade as survivors, then it can be used as a model to
disprove Bakker's more extensive scenario, where *all* non-avian clades
died off.


> I doubt that influenza's like 
> illness would effect the invertebrates as well as the dino's.  


Of course.  In modern decimated areas, food chains collapse from the
bottom up, not from the top down.  Bakker would have been better off
proposing a floral pandemic hypothesis (affecting both the nanoflora in
the oceans as well as the flora on land) as the culprit.

<pb>
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