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by laudablepuss 04/18/2016, 4:34pm PDT |
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New evidence! This is an old argument, whatever it is, since Stephen Gould wrote about it 20+ years ago. Back then it was ruffled feathers that some guys (Walter and Luis Alvarez) who weren't paleontologists should get the last say on why the dinosaurs went extinct. THE NERVE! Is that dynamic still at work all these years later?
And should I take the headline at face value? I think that's provably false since there are dinosaurs below the impact layer and none above it. Unless the new evidence is a dinosaur above that iridium layer, which would be pretty incredible news.
But back to my question: does this study prove something? Dinosaurs seem, on a number-of-species level, to have been in decline. There is also mention of actual Dino populations declining as well. So what is the conclusion we should draw from this? They woulda all died out anyway? I don't see how that conclusion could possibly be warranted. There was a pretty huge non-bolide (as far as we know) related extinction at the end of the Jurassic as well, but dinosaurs bounced back strong in the cretaceous. And the Victorian era belief that clades can just get old and tired and "weak", which this article actually claims, is pretty ridiculous and no longer put forward as a serious argument. Except maybe Arstechnica and this paper. A "deadly tipping point" was reached 90 million years ago, they say, and left unsaid is "and they were just doomed after that". Haha, the quote from the actual paper is "it is clear that they were already past their prime in an evolutionary sense." Oh I see.
I've been aware for a long time of a certain kind of brain damage that certain scientists suffer from. The ones that suggest (for example) that long-necked sauropods couldn't raise their heads up or they'd pass out. Those guys. I worry about those guys, and wonder what the hell is wrong with them. |
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