Re: Armadillos at the K/T!

["philidor11" <philidor11@snet.net>]

<This thread, of which the above is but a small excerpt, is something like
arguing that a person shot in the liver died of liver failure rather than of
being shot.>

A better comparison is the situation in which someone with a weak heart dies
of a heart attack while being mugged, or someone made comatose after a
shooting dies of pneumonia.  In each case, the criminal has legal
responsibility for the death, but the weak heart and pneumonia are certainly
independent contributing factors.
Suppose that a species had been reduced to a single breeding pair before the
bolide.  Does that make the bolide the most significant cause of the
extinction of that species?
The difference is not semantic:  if other major causes unrelated to the
bolide were operating when the bolide hit, then the bolide was the major
cause only because it extinguished a larger number of species.
To prove the bolide the sole cause, you would have to refute any other
possible significant agent.  And that seems impossible.
Bolide as coup de grace, not the coup d'oeil of extinction.