4 ms·
> "The real question is, how did the others—how did any animal—manage to survive? [Impact theorists] have got to come up with a hypothesis that puts equal weigh
by goatlover 8y ago
> "The real question is, how did
the others—how did any animal—manage to
survive? [Impact theorists] have got to come
up with a hypothesis that puts equal weight
on survival. So many of these catastrophists
want to kill the dinosaurs [that] they forget the
rest of the biota. Birds, mammals, and amphibians
managed to survive, and that tells
you that there is something wrong."
This is what always bugged me about the impact extinction scenarios. If it really had that devastating an impact on the entire planet, then why only the dinosaurs and not all land vertebrates?
Does that mean that none of the dinosaurs would have been sufficiently sheltered and capable of surviving the aftermath, but birds, mammals and amphibians could?
- Arnt 8y agoYes. No. Mammals didn't survive as such. The big ones died, as did many, many other species. As the paper points out, "mammals surviving the K-T event were generally rat-sized or smaller". Generally, there are more small animals than big, I mean more individuals of a particular species. There are more flies than elephants. If the chance of of an individual dying in the Big Oven is 99%, greater numbers help the species survive.