Re: extinction

[binder@zk3.dec.com (Ut res per me meliores fiant)]

>>Disease is an especially interesting one ...
>
> I finished reading _THE_DINOSAUR_HERESIES_ since I originally posted that
> note. I don't recall him documenting any disease-driven extinctions ...

It's certainly possible that I saw that elsewhere - so many books, so
little time!  :-)

>>The point Bakker makes is not that a single dread killer disease wiped
>
> Why would this wipe out pterosaurs and sea reptiles at the same time, and
> not mammals and birds?

You could as easily ask why not turtles and crocodilians.  Why do some
bacteria today affect humans but not cats?  Or birds of many species
but not reptiles or mammals?  The answer is that we simply have not the
information we need to answer these kinds of questions.  What is easy;
why is hard.

>>One
>>similar instance I can recall is the diseases Columbus et al. carried
>>with them to the New World.
>
> This did not wipe out the majority of animals in the New World!

I didn't say it did.  I said it was a *similar* instance.

> It did
> not even wipe out the majority of the one species that these diseases did
> affect: Homo sapiens.

Not in the mere 500 years since Columbus, and not in the face of the
fact that much of the human population was in fact essentially immune
or (in Asia and Africa) not exposed, and not in the face of a vastly
intelligent species that has developed a formidable armamentarium for
dealing with disease, true.  Your objection is, I think, not directly
relevant; you'd need to find a counterexample among nonhuman species
over thousands or millions of years.

-dick

>>>>>  Hic sententiae mihi solo sunt, non Conlegioni Armorum Digitalum.  <<<<<
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