[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Subject Index][Author Index]

Re: [dinosaur] Would non-avian dinosaur survive through the whole Cenozoic?



There was a slow-down in speciation rates prior to the K-Pg, see:

Sakamoto, M.; Benton, M. J. & Venditti, C.
Dinosaurs in decline tens of millions of years before their final extinction
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016, 113, 5036-5040
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/13/1521478113.abstract

On 04/12/2019 19:16, David Marjanovic wrote:
Gesendet:ÂMittwoch, 04. Dezember 2019 um 16:51 Uhr
Von:Â"Poekilopleuron" <dinosaurtom2015@seznam.cz>

in his book "Dinosaurs Rediscovered", professor Mike Benton states that even if non-avian dinosaurs survived the K-Pg event, they would probably eventually perish some 50 or 40 million years ago (due to climatic changes and/or other perturbations). This is because of their limited ability to evolve new species in the last millions of years of the Cretaceous.
There is no such thing as an inherent "ability to evolve new species" that doesn't depend on the environment, which changes.

The idea that few new species _did_ evolve in the last few million years of the Cretaceous has long been abandoned: it was based simply on the fact that the Campanian record of North America is better than the Maastrichtian record of North America.