Re: Dinosaurs survived in Antarctica? (Was: Re: "Dinosaurs Died W ithin Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth...")

[Christopher Taylor <ck.taylor@auckland.ac.nz>]

On 19/6/04 10:40 am, "Michael Kaib" <michael@kaib.org> wrote:

> Nick Pharris wrote:
> 
>>> Insecta (damage types to leaves)    51    27
>>>    
>>> 
>> 
>> If I read this correctly, there are 51 documented leaf-damage types in
>> the late Maastrichtian, of which 27% are gone after the K-Pg boundary.
>> A leaf-damage
>> type is not necessarily restricted to a single species (it could be
>> characteristic of a genus or other higher taxon), so the actual count in
>> terms of species could be considerably higher.
>> 
>> And that's completely ignoring the insect species that didn't damage
>> leaves!
>> 
>> Nick Pharris
>> Department of Linguistics
>> University of Michigan
>>  
>> 
> Thank you for the clarification, I didn't recognize this detail . Now I
> remember those articles. The results are not very old. So insects
> suffered hard, as expected.
> 
> Michael Kaib
> Munich, Bavaria
> michael@kaib.org
> 
> 

    Actually, insects seem to have sailed through relatively unscathed (see
various parts of "History of Insects", 2002, edited by Rasnitsyn & Quicke).
The fossil record is too scanty to eliminate the possibility of an
extinction at the species level, but in terms of families, there appears to
be negligible loss (http://www.palaeoentomolog.ru/HistFigs/inse_479.jpg
shows dynamics of insect diversity over time. The upper line is cumulative
first appearances, the lower is cumulative last appearances. Note that it's
fairly flat across the K-T boundary). There was a significant insect
extinction during the Cretaceous, but that had happened some 40 Ma earlier,
to coincide with the rise of angiosperms as the dominant plant form.
    Most insects could probably diapause to get through times of stress.

    Cheers,

        Christopher Taylor