"Lazarus" Dinosaurs in the Paleocene!!?

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

Dear All,
   As I posted in the thread a couple of weeks ago, I don't want to get my 
hopes up too high that non-avian dinosaurs survived into the Early 
Paleocene.  However, having now read more about the evidence that Jim 
Fassett has gathered, I am much less skeptical about that possibility.
    If some hadrosaurs (evidenced by the large femur) and theropods 
(evidenced by some vertebrae) did survive well into the Paleocene (for 
perhaps up to a million years), their numbers would have probably been 
relatively low compared to pre-KT populations.   Therefore, finding 
scattered remains of such "Lazarus" dinosaurs might be difficult, much less 
finding articulated elements.  If they did survive, I would guess we would 
find articulated remains eventually, but probably not anytime soon unless 
somebody gets extremely lucky.
    Until then, the evidence will rest heavily on the hadrosaur femur, and 
especially whether geochemical analysis will confirm that it was not 
reworked.  If confirmed, it could be one of the biggest science news stories 
of 2002.  Hate to get my hopes up, but just can't help it.  Got my fingers 
crossed.
    Anyway, for those of you going to the GSA Meeting in Boston next week, 
perhaps there will be some hints of the results in Jim Fassett's talk.  
Here's the abstract of that talk (which interestingly discusses dinosaur 
eggs as the survival strategy by which they may have made it through the KT 
extinction, one of the KT survival strategies we were discussing here on DML 
not long ago), and if dinosaurs did live in the earliest Paleocene, maybe 
mammalian egg-predation could have caused their final extinction (since the 
mammal/dinosaur "population ratio" would have been much higher than it had 
been in the Cretaceous):

    http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2001AM/finalprogram/abstract_25767.htm

      ----Sounds interesting,  Ken

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