Re: "Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth..."

[Dora Smith <villandra@austin.rr.com>]

I honestly don't think the asteroid encased the entire planet in a fireball.
It might have instantly killed anything that was within a few hundred miles!

I would expect the change to have taken a much longer period of time and to
have resulted more from climate changes than anything else.

Even the Permian extinction took I think millions of years!   A long time,
anyway.

Good point about birds didn't burrow or swim.   I have an article that
suggests that they survived by virtue of living on the southern continent.
But didn't any dinosaurs?

I actually wonder, given the evidence that the ancestors of modern birds
diversified genetically in the early Cretaceous at the latest, if their
nearest common ancestor belonged to group Aves?    My research on dinosaurs
finds considerable convergent evolution among coelurosaurian dinosaurs.    I
am also finding incredible trouble deciding which feathered critters of the
Cretaceous were birds.  And archaeosaur or whatshisname might not be bird
ancestor but an evolutionary dead end!

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, Texas
villandra@austin.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: <MKIRKALDY@aol.com>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 10:37 AM
Subject: "Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth..."


> I don't think anyone has posted this as yet (and in the spirit of take
that, Gerta Keller):
>
> http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2004/168.html
>
> "Study: Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth 65 Million
Years Ago"
> "May 24, 2004"
> "According to new research led by a University of Colorado at Boulder
geophysicist, a giant asteroid that hit the coast of Mexico 65 million years
ago probably incinerated all the large dinosaurs that were alive at the time
in only a few hours, and only those organisms already sheltered in burrows
or in water were left alive." (SNIP)
>
> Mary
>
>