Re: Precocial Dinosaurs [long]

[slaz@electriciti.com (Steven S. Lazarus)]

On 5/15/96 Jon Bois wrote in response to my statements:

>> Egg predation is probably one of many sub-plots, but I don't think
>> it's the main storyline. The Dinosaurs are only one facet of the K/T
>> extinction, this idea can't explain the whole K/T event.

>Nor does it try to.  The K/T was a remarkable confluence of related
>and unrelated events.  Many of these probably didn't happen
>synchronously.  Our feeble minds (present co. excepted) see a cluster of
>events and infer causation.  But, like a blind man shooting at the side
>of a barn, some shots will group together just by chance.  The very grandeur
>of the dino extinctions tend to draw the other events toward it in our
>minds.  And so we see not a series of events but a single "event".  A
>single event is very difficult to explain and, indeed, much evidence
>refutes it.  Arguments such as yours that will only accept ideas in the
>context of a single event, should not be heeded.

I never said that I felt that all the extinctions at the K/T had a
single cause. In fact, in previous postings regarding bolide impacts I
voiced my opinion that the bolide in question may have had such a
large impact on the biosphere because it hit during a time when
populations were already stressed by some of the other factors put
forth as extinction theories such as disease, climate changes,
etc. Maybe some dinosaur species would have survived the impact had
they not been depleted by some of these other evolutionary
challenges. Maybe.

I think the bolide theory is the best we have to explain a planet wide
effect on 80% of the biosphere. It seems that some sort of major
change took place everywhere at relatively the same time in geologic
history.  Scale is the problem. Whatever happened was on a large
scale. It seems reasonable that change on that deep and wide a scale
is due, at least in part, to a deep and wide cause. It doesn't seem
reasonable that small localized cuases could chain-reaction by
themselves into what we have at the K/T. Whether it was a bolide
(which we have some evidence for, e.g.  impact crater and irridium
layer) or something else like a Roswell-like crash of the mother ship
from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (in which case we would need
to find something like a rear-view mirror in the impact crater), it
seems that it was some sort of disaster and not a malingering
thing. It certainly could have been malingering evolutionary causes
but it's much more difficult to imagine than a radical event like a
bolide impact and even more difficult to reason and then prove.

>Our feeble minds (present co. excepted) see a cluster of events and
>infer causation.

The only thing feeble in here is the non-stealthy egg theory. Large
scale events usually do have a cause.

It seems to me that the non-stealthy egg laying idea is an attempt to
be clever rather than realistic. By all means we should freely discuss
all possibilities. But when others point out numerous obvious flaws,
why keep insisting without adequately acknowledging or adequately
addressing (house-gnawing is not good analogy) those flaws? I'm sorry
you did acknowledge the one major flaw of the extinction being a
planet wide phenomenon as a problem. A really major one that should
give serious consideration to abandoning this idea that dinosaurs were
driven into extinction by clever little furry egg lovers. In short,
the non-stealthy egg laying idea itself lays an egg and a rotten one
at that.

S.S. Lazarus