Re: Australian dinosaurs after the K/T boundary?

[Derek Tearne <derek@nezsdc.fujitsu.co.nz>]

> 
>On a National Geographic special on PBS this week, mention was made that
>dinosaurs may have survived beyond the K/T boundary in Australia. 

An interesting article about the Australian Fauna is in Scientific American,
July 1993.  

The front cover has a picture of an allosaur with the southern lights 
behind it.  The cover caption reads "Polar dinosaurs, which were adapted 
to the cold and dark, may have outlived their relatives from warmer
climates.

>The reason
>given was that Australia was near the south pole at that time, and this
>acclimatized the dinosaurs to the colder weather that followed the K/T 
>boundary.

The main premise in the article is that many members of the Australian
fauna (which is early cretaceous) were the last of their lineages.  This
includes the latest known allosaur and even Labyrinthodonts 115 million
years after they died out elsewhere.

The implication is that the fauna in Gondwana, already adapted to a 
cooler climate, was better able to survive a general worldwide cooling 
trend.   

>Does anyone know what evidence this claim of dinos beyond the Cretaceous Era is
>based on? Have fossils been found above the boundary layer in Australia?

Although nowhere do they actually state that dinosaur fossils have been 
found above the KT boundary they imply that, if they survived anywhere, 
they survived in Gondwana.  The final paragraph also poses the question
that would animals so superbly adapted to cold and dark have been
phased in the slightest by the kind of artificial winter proposed by the 
meteorite impact people, unless the artificial winter lasted for a long 
time indeed.

>Annoyingly, the show did not mention any details (not even the name of who was
>making such a claim).

The article was written by Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas Hewitt Rich.
Vickers-Rich is from Monash Univeristy, Melbourne, Rich is from the 
Museum of Victoria, also in Melbourne.

---
Derek Tearne.                                           derek@fujitsu.co.nz
Some of the more environmentally aware dinosaurs were worried about the
consequences of an accident with the new Iridium enriched fusion reactor.
"If it goes off only the cockroaches and mammals will survive..." they said.