RE: Armadillos at the K/T!

["Michael de Sosa" <ofsosa@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but how come dinosaurian
egg-and-young-eaters didn't wipe out the larger species a hundred million
years before this? They were above badger-size for a lot longer than the
mammals were, if that means anything.

Sorry if I seem skeptical before knowing all the facts, but it just seems
unlikely to me that diverse groups of mammals on every continent waited
until the very end of the Cretaceous to simultaneously grow large enough to
be a threat to dinosaur eggs, and that they found and devoured every single
nest of every single dinosaur species on every single continent. Not to
mention that this remarkable feat of dietary prowess occurred around the
same time as a huge meteor hitting the Earth and severe climate changes due
to regressions in sea level.

There were probably tons of factors affecting the K/T mass extinction. Nest
predation may be one of them, even an important one, but I have a hard time
believing it was the primary one.

Then again, maybe that's what they WANT me to think! Maybe the mammals
pulled off the most elaborate frame job in earth's history!

Chicxulub: "I'm innocent, I tells ya! Innocent!"
Extinction Police: "Tell it ta the judge. Book him, Dano."

Mike de Sosa
UC Berkeley

PS - I won't be here to respond, as I'm leaving for Bozeman tomorrow. Not
that I really have anything more to say anyway.