Re: Armadillos at the K/T!

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

John Bois (jbois@umd5.umd.edu) wrote:

<No. The hypothesis comes from the simple observation that a strategy that was 
once widespread is
today non-existent.  With the exception of crocs, all oviparous species avoid 
confrontation with
nest predators by concealing, laying remotely, or some other tactic.  Nest 
defense is a last
resort.  There are only two explanations for that a) the strategy is defunct 
because predators
restrict it; b) practitioners of such a strategy didn't evolve because of 
reasons having nothing
to do with their fitness, e.g., because mammals were in all niches in all 
locations before
oviparous species could get there.  Giving me the benefit of the doubt (and 
choosing a), this
leads to the inference that this predator regime must have started at some 
time.  A good place to
look is at the time when this strategy first began to collapse.  The next thing 
to do is look for
potential candidate predators.  So, you've got it backwards.>

  What is apparently missing from this, and throws the whole thing off, is that 
this strategy of
hinding eggs, is performed by nearly _every_ single egg-layer, including those 
that lay in water,
or they compensate for predation by producing mass quantities or laying in 
mass-yield areas. There
is no apparent decline in large egg-layers unless the observation is by the 
loss of larger
dinosaurian or Cenozoic crocodylian/choristoderan egg-layers.

  The idea that the end of the dinosaurian "reign" came about via predation on 
eggs is unviable as
there must be a global component, which is only evidenced by the iridium layer, 
being a cosmic
event. This single piece of evidence throws doubt onto the predation data, 
which is weakened by
the lack of any evidence for a single culprit. If there is no evidence, then 
the hypothesis cannot
be tested.


=====
Jaime A. Headden

  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhr-gen-ti-na
  Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Pampas!!!!

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