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

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

That is a good point.   To put it on nontechnicalese, dinosaurs had a far 
greater degree of genetic diversity than the little group comprised of Aves, 
so it is fairly unlikely that some flu virus wiped out all of the dinosaurs 
but Aves.

It is possible.   Conceivably Aves alone had the one genetic difference that 
allowed it to survive.

The fact that the theory is dinocentric doesn't make it unlikely. 
Influenza affects all warm blooded animals and only warm blooded animals. 
But the only warm blooded animals at the time were dinosaurs and mammals. 
Mammals might not have been affected at the same rate as dinosaurs.  The 
current H5N1 virus does affect some groups of mammals but is not causing 
massive die-offs of them as with birds.

However, the notion that Aves had particular adaptations, maybe in 
conjunction with its apparent location in Australia and Antartica, maybe 
relatively unimpacted by disaster, that made it possible to survive comet 
collision or volcanic castrophe.

It is not unlikely that epidemic disease, possibly of more than one sort, 
played a role in the end of the dinosaurs.   Ecological catastrophe would 
have left them more vulnerable than usual to whatever disease came along, 
and often all a disease needs to gain a foothold is a starving population. 
For instance, plague became pandemic in Europe specifically because sudden 
climate change immediately before the plague arrived in Europe left great 
numbers of people starving.   Bubonic plague had actually been around in 
Asia and the Near East for millenia before that but never with such 
dramatically catastrophic consequences.   Bubonic plague still exists in our 
environment, but people seldom catch it, even in the Third World where large 
numbers of people catch any disease you can name.

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, TX
tiggernut24@yahoo.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Bigelow" <bigelowp@juno.com>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2006 12:28 AM
Subject: Re: H1N5 (and Bakker's virus extinction hypothesis) now H5N1


> 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.



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