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

[John Bois <jbois@umd5.umd.edu>]

On Sat, 29 May 2004, David Marjanovic wrote:

> Well, most birds seem to have gone extinct. :^) This scenario also supports
> the scenario (erm... uh... :-] ) that birds survived only in/around
> Antarctica.

Indeed, this is not the spirit of the paper.  In part,it aims to explain
the survival of a globally diverse clade of birds.  That is, confronted
with the reality of an apparently rich survival, how do you explain the
_extinctions_ of the other species?  For that, you need either a magic
bullet or a global killing mechanism that selects some things and not
others.  The paper argues that global IR fried all birds that could not
find shelter.  But it is quite open about it not working for all clades.
It also provides questionable hypotheses for others--e.g., the sponge-duck
hypothesis.

To me, it looks like some other force--mainly _before_ the K/T--did in
enantiornithines.  That being true, you can take birds off the hit list.
"Mass Extinctions" grade into background extinctions.  The K/T is one of
the smaller mass extinctions.  Now, how does taking birds out of the
extinction affect its status?