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.
Heh, I had a somewhat lengthy rant on this which I
didn't send b/c I thought it not important enough for
putting to the list. It sounded much the same. "What
would a surviving T. rex eat?" was probably the most
salient thing I had in and you don't ;-)
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.
In a nutshell and restricting it to terrestrial
ecosystems, a non-avian dino's world went and a
bird-and-mammal world came.
The simple fact that during the latter half of the
Mesozoic, there was an hitherto unparalleled abundance
of MEGA-anything (herbivores, carnivores). Not puny
megafauna like horses and rhinos and tigers, but the
really big guys. That alone must have had an effect on
the ecosystems, plants finding an equilibrium with
their herbivores, etc.
And what is suspect about this one is the locality.
There probably was little more inhospitable terrain in
the earliest Paleogene than the
southwestern/south-central US... if the present
estimates about impact angle of the Chixculub bolide
are correct, it received far more of the immediate
consequences (and ejecta) and relatively more of the
mid-term consequences than most other places on Earth.
The area in question must have been literally
cauterized.
If he'd had dug up his find on Chatham Island, *that*
would be interesting indeed. But this is simply