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Re: Dr. Bakker, Dr. Horner, The 'Dino-Pandemic' & The Canard About Declining Dinosaur Diversity in the

Sorry, was gone all day and got back late.....

Vlad,

Interesting assessment. Missed a few things though...... Hay fever killing the dinos, mammals outcompeting them, eating all the eggs, cosmic ray bursters etc.....

In addition to Phil's points......

Attorneys, (in my limited exposure, thank heavens!) are generally trained in distilling simplicity out of complexity. (A useful skill in some venues.) Paleontologists on the other hand, often find themselves doing just the opposite. While a lack of evidence is certainly not evidence by itself, it does leave the door open for compelling conjecture and speculation that several of us heavily bearded burley outdoor types often take to the bank. This action by itself doesn't necessarily connote a huge logical leap, it is just one interpretation of the available fossil record. Likewise, your belief that Hell Creek is not, in an by itself, representative of the entire world circa 65 million BC is a similar interpretation also based on lack of evidence (however likely correct). Unlike legal proceeding which operate under rules of engagement (similar to jihad), paleontological discussion often ends up in a world far far away in what I often compare to geologic cartoons. The cartoon itself is not intended or expected to be the actual picture of the world 65 mya but a concept representing the world as the thinker sees the world. Logic, in and of itself will not answer all of the questions that arise from actual exploration. For example, who would logically conclude that a huge predator/scavanger (whatever) like T- rex would have such tiny little arms? It goes against all logic.

What you are so vehemently rejecting, (arguments exploring the edge of reason) is by it's very nature the heart and sole of a detective science that looks as numerous clues and draws conclusions. If one dismisses all those arguments off the cuff that are not entirely logical, you will eventually miss a right answer. Nature doesn't always work in logical ways. So as a basis of absolute right or wrong, I reject your premise that all things that happened 65 million years ago have to follow logic as we understand it. I actually love throwing around thinly supported assumptions because they make you (and me) think outside the box. When everyone follows the same drummers beat, paleontology will stagnate as a science. To badly paraphrase Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when all the obvious things are impossible, the right answer is often the improbable. It is important to note such things.

Actually the delta diversity issue was a minimal side note to the main point of the thread of pandemic effect in the down fall of the dinosaur rubric. The only thing that we know for sure is that there was a diversity change with time. Obviously (it currently seems) at the end of the Maastrictian there was a global die off of many species. Given Cretaceous ET impactor(s) played a big role and set the stage perhaps killing many species outright, however, IMHO, the actual die off(s) occurred because of a myriad of causes. There were certainly punctuation marks and exclamation points during the die off (s). Certainly no one cause killed everything. Secondary effects like food chain interruptions or climate change are every bit important in the net effect as an instigating agent (like an asteroid). Disease was certainly a secondary effect of any extinction event of such world wide scope. It may have been a primary one in certain species . Viruses and bacteria have been a blessing and a scourge to life since they were the only life. Periodic pandemics seem to be a fact of life on the blue planet and their effect on human kind is fairly well documented (sort of). I suspect pandemic disease organisms have played a very serious role in dinosaur evolution (extinction?) and to blunt the idea outright is dismissing a major player in phylogeny. The question is actually one of applied time scale and degree not if disease organism played a role. This question is not likely to be answered in the rock record.

BTW, I think that old insignificant Hell Creek/Lance is pretty important mainly because my house is built directly upon it. It is the upper Cretaceous to me. I leave the wider world view to those with grants, salaries and travel budgets. I do however pay serious homage to those, with that world view, opinions in this forum.

My sincere apologies if my splurge of my thinking that dinosaur diversity was declining before the end is proven wrong (not a given) in the scheme of things, but I won't "be chastened" for the speculation/regurgitation toward the discourse. I may even make such sweeping generalizations again if my ignorance or my personal geologic cartoons get carried away and typed out loud. I point out that in this forum, even outrageous explanations should be encouraged. I seem to remember (in my college days) hearing about a new way off the wall idea called plate tectonics by some guy I never had heard of. Hey, I remember another one, some guy named Alvarez, he was considered way out there too.

You may be right but,,,,, Go Dr. Bakker, Go Dr. Horner, hit em again, harder harder!!

Frank (Rooster) Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming
www.cattleranch.org



On May 14, 2006, at 12:01 PM, bucketfoot-al@justice.com wrote:

*Chuckle*

Jack Horner has his "TRex was not a Predator"  lapses
in sanity;

Bob Bakker has his own quirks - like occasionally
groping around for scant (nonexistent?) evidence that
something other than the Chixculub asteroid was
responsible for the dinosaur extinction.

And both esteemed gentlemen going against all logic all
the while.

Frank (Rooster) Bliss just posted something that got me
going, however.  In replying to the 'Pandemic' post,
Frank repeated an old canard about dinosaur diversity
declining just before Chixculub.

Frank, I've been an attorney (blessedly retired from
law at the moment) for 20 years and a fair military
(JAG) prosecutor in my time if I may say :>)

So, while I am but a layman re: Palaeontology, I CAN
claim a bit of an ability for logical analysis (as I
hope I demonstrated several years ago in dismantling
Dr. Horner's 'TRex was not a Predator' conjecture in a
rather lengthy post to the DML, which was also recently
printed as article in Prehistoric Times.)

We had a saying that "Absence of evidence is NOT
evidence of absence."

Besides the fact that a detailed review of the
fragmentary fossils at Hell Creek done several years
ago by a paleotologist whose name escapes me right now,
made just to investigate this theory, appeared to
disprove this 'Dino-diversity was on the decline'
theory, there are HUGE logical leaps that you are
making when you make such a statement:

Consider these points if you will (and be chastened not
to throw around such thinly supported assumptions in
the future ;>)

1.  This 'Declining Dino-diversity' analysis is largely
(solely?) based on the fossil record of Hell Creek
(which itself may not support it upon a closer analysis
as I mentioned above) - but Western North America was
but a small SLIVER of the Globe 65 MYA...

2.  I believe (and correct me if I am mistaken, please)
that outside of Hell Creek, there is practically no
other major Cretaceous fossil site accessible (ie near
the surface) covering the period of 65 MYA; therefore
such an assumption is based on such a small section of
evidence as to be probatively worthless (cannot support
such a sweeping generalization);

3.  I believe that evidence from Western Asia of the
late Cretaceous also shows diversification and the
appearance of new groups of critters (Therizinosaurs,
for example);

4.  We now realize that mass extinctions in the fossil
record (ie. Permian, Triassic/Jurassic boundary) appear
closely related to asteroid/comet impacts;

5.  From a logical analysis this is just about the only
thing that makes sense, because a global extinction
implies a global cause...dinosaurs survived for 165
million years, and therefore had managed to adapt to
normal stressors like climate change and disease - to
think that such a dominant group of animals could have
been wiped out or even seriously weakened by a 'global
pandemic' fails the Logic 101 analysis, not to mention
the fact that there is ZERO evidence for it - as
opposed to that BIG hole in Yucatan, the melted glass
at the bottom of it, evidence of simultaneous tsunamis
in Texas deposits, and that troublesome Iridium spike
which is followed by fossil evidence of an almost dead
world...

So, to sum up:  given the KNOWN fossil evidence from
around the globe, it would appear that Dinosaur
diversity in the late Cretaceous was alive and well,
with new, even stranger groups of critters appearing
(at least in the Northern Hemisphere), while the old
Sauropod and Allosaurid prototypes were so successful
that they continued undisturbed in the Southern
Hemisphere, and even allowed a Sauropod return to North
America via a land bridge towards the end...

...which the fragmentary evidence of a tiny,
insignificant corner of the globe called Hell Creek,
which just happens to be accessible to us because it is
on the surface at the moment, does not, and cannot,
disprove...

Cheers,

Vlad

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