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Re: Age Abstractions

Reworking of stuff is pretty common though. Articulated specimens are the only proof beyond a doubt. Best of luck to him on the articulated one. They are pretty rare in my experience sitting on top of a formation know for such occurrences. What's a few hundred thousand years give or take anyway. That is of course, unless you are trying to get 100000 year resolution on a 65 million year old event.

Besides, I suspect that several non-avian theropod types did survive what ever punctuated event that killed the majority of dinosaurian types. They lingered on in a new habitat with different ecological niches and new food chain relationships until they weren't viable as a population any more. Then they followed their ancestors to the grave as a species. Mammals jumped in and filled the void. I would be very surprised if several dinosaurian lineages don't eventually pop up in Paleocene rocks lasting a few to hundreds of few thousand years after the K/T boundary. It all boils down into where is that durned boundary.

I postulate again that the Cretaceous mass extinction was not resultant from one cause but from millions of accumulated occurrences initiated by a myriad of events. Some of those events were more significant in the scheme of things obviously but none the less, change was "BAD" for the dinosaurians except for the avian lineage. Just like the current die off of megafauna, lots of events (not all human) are responsible. The chain of events was then/ and now is complex.

Dogma is such until a movement occurs to get rid of the stink.

Frank (Rooster) Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming
www.wyomingdinosaurs.com


On Jun 20, 2007, at 9:23 AM, K and T Dykes wrote:

Whilst having a quick amble around this afternoon, I got to wandering and
wondering what sort of reaction would be reasonable, should somebody find an
unambiguous early Paleocene dino; perhaps a tin of ornithischian stewing
meat with a best before date or something. For the while, I'm going to
assume friend Fassett really has hit the jackpot. And, if it turns out
otherwise, then I hope he gets it with his next attempt. Or the one after
that. I want him to come up with one.

That way, I could learn what the significance might be. After all, this
would actually be a rather stingy half-a-million year extension to the known
fossil record. Half-a-million year extensions for taxa aren't exactly ten a
penny, but they rarely herald the dawns of brand new, sparkling paradigm
vacuum cleaners, to clean away the dust and cobwebs that conventional wisdom
and entrenched dogma models failed to suck in over the years.

One sentence of Fassett's abstract made most attractive reading, namely the
second in this snip. The first is for context: "Now, with the discovery of
Paleocene dinosaurs, the paradigm of Cretaceous-only dinosaurs must shift.
Let us hope that this paradigm-shift will be a smooth and placid
lateral-slip along planar fault blocks rather than a grumbling, rumbling,
herky-jerky sliding of jagged-edged, opposing sides past each other."

It makes a perhaps half-a-million year taxon extension into an event to
remember, rather than just another like all the rest.