*Chuckle*
Jack Horner has his "TRex was not a Predator" lapses
in sanity;
Bob Bakker has his own quirks - like occasionally
groping around for scant (nonexistent?) evidence that
something other than the Chixculub asteroid was
responsible for the dinosaur extinction.
And both esteemed gentlemen going against all logic all
the while.
Frank (Rooster) Bliss just posted something that got me
going, however. In replying to the 'Pandemic' post,
Frank repeated an old canard about dinosaur diversity
declining just before Chixculub.
Frank, I've been an attorney (blessedly retired from
law at the moment) for 20 years and a fair military
(JAG) prosecutor in my time if I may say :>)
So, while I am but a layman re: Palaeontology, I CAN
claim a bit of an ability for logical analysis (as I
hope I demonstrated several years ago in dismantling
Dr. Horner's 'TRex was not a Predator' conjecture in a
rather lengthy post to the DML, which was also recently
printed as article in Prehistoric Times.)
We had a saying that "Absence of evidence is NOT
evidence of absence."
Besides the fact that a detailed review of the
fragmentary fossils at Hell Creek done several years
ago by a paleotologist whose name escapes me right now,
made just to investigate this theory, appeared to
disprove this 'Dino-diversity was on the decline'
theory, there are HUGE logical leaps that you are
making when you make such a statement:
Consider these points if you will (and be chastened not
to throw around such thinly supported assumptions in
the future ;>)
1. This 'Declining Dino-diversity' analysis is largely
(solely?) based on the fossil record of Hell Creek
(which itself may not support it upon a closer analysis
as I mentioned above) - but Western North America was
but a small SLIVER of the Globe 65 MYA...
2. I believe (and correct me if I am mistaken, please)
that outside of Hell Creek, there is practically no
other major Cretaceous fossil site accessible (ie near
the surface) covering the period of 65 MYA; therefore
such an assumption is based on such a small section of
evidence as to be probatively worthless (cannot support
such a sweeping generalization);
3. I believe that evidence from Western Asia of the
late Cretaceous also shows diversification and the
appearance of new groups of critters (Therizinosaurs,
for example);
4. We now realize that mass extinctions in the fossil
record (ie. Permian, Triassic/Jurassic boundary) appear
closely related to asteroid/comet impacts;
5. From a logical analysis this is just about the only
thing that makes sense, because a global extinction
implies a global cause...dinosaurs survived for 165
million years, and therefore had managed to adapt to
normal stressors like climate change and disease - to
think that such a dominant group of animals could have
been wiped out or even seriously weakened by a 'global
pandemic' fails the Logic 101 analysis, not to mention
the fact that there is ZERO evidence for it - as
opposed to that BIG hole in Yucatan, the melted glass
at the bottom of it, evidence of simultaneous tsunamis
in Texas deposits, and that troublesome Iridium spike
which is followed by fossil evidence of an almost dead
world...
So, to sum up: given the KNOWN fossil evidence from
around the globe, it would appear that Dinosaur
diversity in the late Cretaceous was alive and well,
with new, even stranger groups of critters appearing
(at least in the Northern Hemisphere), while the old
Sauropod and Allosaurid prototypes were so successful
that they continued undisturbed in the Southern
Hemisphere, and even allowed a Sauropod return to North
America via a land bridge towards the end...
...which the fragmentary evidence of a tiny,
insignificant corner of the globe called Hell Creek,
which just happens to be accessible to us because it is
on the surface at the moment, does not, and cannot,
disprove...
Cheers,
Vlad
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