RE: Alternative origins of birds (humor) (was RE: birds DID NOT evolve from therapods)

["Tracy L. Ford" <dino.hunter@home.com>]

The other comic symposium I came up with this year is "You Can't Handle The
Truth: Alternative Ecologies of Famous Fossil Forms".  The two talks
suggested so far is the reality that hadrosaurids were voracious predators,
from which the herbivorous tyrannosaurs had to run in terror; and the fact
that trilobites were NOT really marine bottom feeders but were in fact
flying terrestrial ravenous carnivores.  In fact, it turns out that
vertebrates had colonized the land very early in the Cambrian, but the
piranha-like feeding habits of the trilobites prevented from any of their
skeletons from making it into the fossil record.  Only after the decline of
trilobite diversity in the Frasnian-Fammenian extinctions (Late Devonian)
was the depredations of these forms reduced enough that we start to pick up
a better terrestrial vertebrate fossil record...

At the next GSA meeting they have a session on comedy and geology. I
couldn't believe I was seeing it in the abstract volume. So, sure, its due
able.

Tracy L. Ford
P. O. Box 1171
Poway Ca  92074