Re: Preservational bias revisited

[John Bois <jbois@umd5.umd.edu>]

On Thu, 26 Jun 1997 Dinogeorge@aol.com wrote:
> The very late Cretaceous
> is well sampled in North America, and remains of tiny, Compy-size and
> smaller, non-avian dinos just don't turn up. 

And nor do non-avian dinosaur eggs other than in sites with sediment (I
mean sites that were sedimented _before_ the eggs were laid).  So can't I
assume that you at least would have no trouble with the claim: Very late
cretaceous non-avian dinosaurs sited their nest in relatively open
locations.


Virtually all other terrestrial
> small-animal niches were occupied exclusively by mammals, which evidently had
> progressively replaced the small dinosaurs (e.g., the smallest
> ornithischians) during the span of the Cretaceous. Lack of small species is
> not a contributing factor in extinction itself, but rather the reason that
> dinosaurs didn't return (except, as we might expect, in the form of giant,
> flightless predatory birds) in the Cenozoic.
> 
> I really should put this kind of stuff onto a BCF web site sometime, where
> interested readers can refer to it, review it, comment on it, and so forth.
>