Hi,
More blatantly off topic...
You have to remember that when Alvarez first suggested a cosmic impact had
done in the dino's, paleontologists reacted like some new gang had just invaded
their turf wearing the wrong colors! The general tenor of their immediate
reaction was pretty much, hey! these guys have NO RIGHT to theorize about OUR
STUFF! Of course, within weeks, everybody remembered to put their "objective
scientist" hats back on, at least in public.
I think that it's ironic that Bakker, a brilliant maverick inside his own
field, acts like a Victorian theologian confronted with Darwin to this day about
impact. His "hints" about mixing isolated populations who then all die from
unfamiliar diseases is the lamest excuse for not accepting the obvious. The
introduction of new diseases from isolated populations coming into contact with
each other happens and has happened constantly throughout the entire history of
life on earth, from the latest case of Hong Kong Flu in Los Angeles to the West
Nile Virus in New York and then the Midwest, and so on. Some die; some live. No
species has EVER been extincted by this mechanism and the notion that THOUSANDS
of species could be simultaneously wiped out by an unfamiliar disease is
blatantly ridiculous. (Can I use "blatant" twice in one post?)
The correlation of impacts and extinctions is just too good to be ignored,
even for impacts we don't have direct evidence of yet. We don't know for sure
caused the Australo-Asian tektite field about 800,000 years ago, BUT there was a
simultaneous minor extinction of hundreds of mammalian species at the same time
(just mammals, no fish, no repitles, no plants, any guesses?). I don't what the
event was, but you can't ignore the "coincidence." It's like, "I was just
standing here with this smoking gun, Officer, when out of nowhere this guy
staggered over here and dropped dead on the sidewalk in front of me."
The dinosaurs must have survived many, many climatic changes and countless
brushes with unfamiliar diseases in their 130 million year span on Earth. Many
dinosaur species did not survive these changes and were replaced with other new
or related species. An extinction event is obviously different than "normal"
geologic change, however.
Besides impacts being correlated with extinction events (however they
unfold), they are also correlated with magnetic field reversals (for which the
mechanism is mostly unknown) and with major eustatic changes in sea level (for
which the mechanism is completely unknown) and with major climatic shifts as
well (for which the mechanism is the subject of endless argument). Too damn many
coincidences for me.
Sterling K. Webb
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi Ron and list
> This is off topic, blatantly
>
> I have read many of the popular theories on the extinction events argued in
> this message, and to be frank, the fact remains that dinosaurs, in general,
> were on the decline. Both Horner and Bakker point this out. The why of it is
> speculative, both Horner and Bakker hint at such using transgressions and
> digressions of oceans and the "re-mingling" of species which had been
> separated for up to millions of years at times, could introduce disease and
> thus wipe out whole herds. As far as an impacter causing the extinction. I'm
> skeptical, for then, how do the mammals, marsupials, and birds, all
> non-burrowing, survive a "world affecting" impact. The way I understand the
> k-t boundary is that as you get further from the impact sight, the layer
> becomes thinner, thats fair, but how is one to find fossils in a layer a
> centimeter or two thick when fossilization is a matter of luck (on our part)
> and the proper sequence of events (on the fossils part), and the K-T layer
> is never really that large anyway compared to sediment layers that dino
> bones are found in. I don't see good merit to place the extinction solely on
> the impact. I do see that it could account for mass extinction. But, the
> fossil record doesn't support this for dinosaurs.
> My humble opinion (I am just an undergrad).
> Mark
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ron Baalke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Meteorite Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 8:58 AM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Dinosaurs Experienced Climate Changes Before K-T
> Collision
>
> >
> > http://www.psu.edu/ur/2003/cretaciousclimatechange.html
> >
> > Dinosaurs Experienced Climate Changes Before K-T Collision
> > Pennsylvnia State University
> > January 14, 2003
> >
> > University Park, Pa. - Climate change had little to do with the demise of
> > the dinosaurs, but the last million years before their extinction had a
> > complex pattern of warming and cooling events that are important to our
> > understanding of the end of their reign, according to geologists.
> >
> > "The terrestrial paleoclimate record near the K-T is historically
> > contradictory and poorly resolved," says Dr. Peter Wilf, assistant
> professor
> > of geosciences at Penn State. "In contrast, the resolution of K-T marine
> > climates that has emerged over the last 10 years is excellent. Our work
> > brings the terrestrial record up to speed so that we can look for global
> > climate events that occurred for both land and sea."
> >
> > Wilf worked with Kirk R. Johnson, curator of paleontology, Denver Museum
> of
> > Nature & Science, who provided the data on land plant fossils and Brian T.
> > Huber, curator of Foraminifera, National Museum of Natural History,
> > Smithsonian Institution, who provided the marine data.
> >
> > An extraterrestrial object that impacted the Earth near the Yucatan in
> > Mexico 65.51 million years ago doomed the dinosaurs and 70 percent of the
> > Earth's other species, vaporizing itself and the surrounding rocks and
> > throwing enough ash, soot and debris into the atmosphere to effectively
> stop
> > photosynthesis worldwide. This impact radically altered the natural
> > progression of evolution. The time of the impact is called the K-T
> boundary
> > and marked the end of Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the Tertiary
> > Period.
> >
> > "It could be argued that we are still recovering from that impact and the
> > mass extinctions of dinosaurs, mammals, insects, plants and sea life that
> it
> > caused," says Wilf, who worked on this project at the University of
> Michigan
> > before coming to Penn State. "For example, not only the dinosaurs, but
> also
> > 80 to 90 percent of the Cretaceous plant species, including all the
> dominant
> > species, disappeared."
> >
> > According to Wilf, there is a lingering minority argument that the K-T
> > extinction was caused by climate change, but the research team's results,
> > published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
> > Sciences, both document the climate changes and show that they were not
> the
> > principal cause.
> >
> > Wilf, Johnson and Huber first worked to create a finely resolved
> terrestrial
> > temperature record, based on plant fossils, and then correlated that
> record
> > with the existing marine records.
> >
> > Plant fossils from the one million-year period before the extinction that
> > are abundant and well preserved in a fine time sequence are found only in
> > New Mexico and North Dakota. Of the two, the North Dakota sites are
> > comparably much more intensively collected and studied and enabled Johnson
> > to collect 22,000 plant fossils of more than 300 fossil plant species.
> >
> > "Only in the last year, with the publication of an entire volume filled
> with
> > new research results on the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota, can we
> do
> > this work and tie the plant fossil record there to actual dates in
> millions
> > of years rather than relative dates," says Wilf. Johnson is a co-editor
> and
> > contributor for the Hell Creek volume.
> >
> > Fossils can be dated relatively by their position in the stratigraphy or
> > layers of sediment using a simple rule. In undisturbed layers, the oldest
> > fossils are in the lowest layers and the most recent fossils are in higher
> > levels. Tying relative dates to real dates is not easy, especially keeping
> > within the 100,000 year sensitivity available in the marine record, which
> > comes from the scientific results of the ocean drilling program.
> >
> > Luckily, the K-T extinction occurred during a short interval in the
> Earth's
> > magnetic pole reversals. Periodically, the Earth's poles switch polarity
> > making North negative and South positive. Eventually, another switch
> occurs
> > making North positive and South negative. A record of the Earth's
> > paleomagnetism is recorded in the rocks as they are laid down.
> >
> > "Three hundred and thirty-three thousand years before the extinction, a
> pole
> > reversal occurred," says Wilf. "Two hundred and seventy thousand years
> after
> > the extinction, another reversal occurred."
> >
> > Because the researchers have three datable points --the two reversals and
> > the K-T impact - they could attach ages to the layers and the fossils
> within
> > and correlate the terrestrial and marine data at much finer resolution
> than
> > ever before.
> >
> > Simply equating the layers, however, was not enough. The researchers
> needed
> > to estimate the temperature of the environment in which each fossil grew.
> > For the plants, this turned out to be simple, using a method first
> developed
> > in 1915 that is still widely used today.
> >
> > Modern forests have two types of trees, those with toothed leaves and
> those
> > with smooth leaves. The cooler the climate, the higher the percentage of
> > species with toothed leaves.
> >
> > "The presence of palm species also suggests a warm climate as these plants
> > cannot survive the ground freezing," says Wilf.
> >
> > The researchers found from the plants that the long, slow cooling that
> > occurred for millions of years of the Late Cretaceous was broken by a
> > warming event that began about 66 million years ago and peaked 300,000 to
> > 100,000 years before the K-T collision. The temperatures then returned to
> > baseline just before the collision and stayed nearly constant before and
> > after the collision. The plant record agreed strongly with the marine
> data,
> > which comes from ocean coring projects in the South Atlantic, Antarctica
> and
> > off the shores of New Jersey and Florida, and is based on the oxygen
> isotope
> > ratios in the skeletons of marine-shelled micropredators called
> > Foraminifera. The colder the water, the more of the heavier oxygen isotope
> > is incorporated in the calcium carbonate of the shells. The sediments that
> > entomb the forams also record the paleomagnetic reversals around the K-T.
> >
> > Because the marine data come from four different locations and the
> > terrestrial data from a fifth, the warming and cooling trends seem global,
> > according to Wilf. The marine data also show that warm water forams
> migrated
> > from the tropics as far as New Jersey and Antarctica.
> >
> > While the mean annual temperature in North Dakota today is 43 to 45
> degrees
> > Fahrenheit, during the warmest part of the warming episode, the mean
> annual
> > temperature was from 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The North Dakota site
> was
> > then at the same latitude as Quebec City, Canada, and not only palm trees,
> > but alligators and turtles thrived too.
> >
> > "The K-T impact affected the Earth's living things severely and
> > dramatically, but the climate changes right before the impact, by
> > comparison, did not," says Wilf. "Understanding the climate and vegetation
> > before the impact gives us insight into what kind of world the meteorite
> > struck, and shows us that it was warming, cooling, lushly forested and
> > otherwise functioning the way it always has done. The dinosaurs were well
> > adapted to global warming and cooling, but not to giant speeding rocks
> from
> > space."
> >
> > The American Chemical Society, National Science Foundation and Smithsonian
> > Institution funded this research.
> >
> > **aem**
> >
> > Contacts:
> > A'ndrea Elyse Messer (814) 865-9481 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Vicki Fong (814) 865-9481 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > EDITORS: Dr. Wilf is at 814-865-6721 or at [EMAIL PROTECTED] by e-mail.
> > Dr. Johnson is at 303-370-6448 or at [EMAIL PROTECTED] by e-mail. Dr.
> Huber
> > is at 202-786-2658 or at [EMAIL PROTECTED] by e-mail.
> >
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