Egged on

[rstephen@cswnet.com (Roger A. Stephenson)]

Hello all,

As you can see I have choosen to respond to the thread concerning the
untested and unproven thoery that itsy bitsy mammals ate most of the
dinosaurs eggs and that lead to global mass extinction.

No way! No how! (Stop now if you're the sensitive type 'cause I'm fixin' to
get busy).

Unless the mammals also ate the larva of ammonites, and somehow caused the
extinction of  planktonic micro organisms, then turned their attention to
the ocean going reptiles, and gnawed down thousands of species of plants,
the idea is altogether wrong. Mammals had no real impact on these other
families of  organisms that just happened to go the way of the dinosaur.
Whatever happened was planet-wide, and found every nook and cranny. The
fact that any species is represented today, that lived then, is a miracle.
Not a 700 Club type miracle, but rather a lotto-win act of random chance.
No species thought its way through the event either. Whatever happened was
not species, family, or order dependant. To speculate otherwise is not only
a waste of time but unsupportable and silly.

While I'm not a biologist in the pure scientific sense I have been out of
the house a few times. Yes squirrels eat bird eggs, as do snakes, other
birds, and other species. However the truth is these predations have
minimal impact on egg layering species overall population. Localized and
widespread effects may vary wildly, but nature has a balancing act we can
only slightly understand. Skunks love yellow jacket nests, being full of
tender grubs, but there always seems to be yellow jackets(underground
burrowing wasps) and skunks. I saw a fox squirrel get run over by a pickup
a few years back, because a mockingbird was chasing it away from its nest.
The squirrel may have got an egg but the cost was extreme(freely substitute
fox for truck in more rural setting). Killdeer are very effective ground
nesters, and aside from the broke-wing tactic their eggs look like rocks. I
doubt dinosaurs were any less protective of their nests than todays birds
are. Some would flee, like a robin, while others were highly aggressive,
like the mockingbird.

Until we build a "way back machine" we may never know, beyond a shadow of a
doubt, what the real cause of the K/T event was. However we can be more
sure what didn't cause it. Hadrosaur omelets at the cretaceous IHOP is one
of the later.

BTW I like the handle "Joe Friday". "Just the facts" is what science is all
about. The facts, as we know them, may change as time goes on, but without
them we all might as well tell "fishin" stories. Aren't we all detectives
of  acient time?

Roger A. Stephenson
aka Joe Friday
2nd generation Power PC user