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Why birds survived and dinosaurs went extinct after an asteroid hit earth (2020)
- ado__dev 2y agoThe birds had wings, so they could just fly away. /s
- taylodl 2y agoImagine a T. Rex looking up at the sky at huge flocks of birds leaving! Good for them their peanut-sized brain had no awareness of what was going on!
- mistrial9 2y agothe video commercials on that site make the news item unreadable
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MeImCounting 2y agoI just Xed out the "Looks like youre blocking ads" dialogue and was able to read the article fine.
- spacecadet 2y agoGood shout, drives me crazy- The Smithsonian cant run a site without ads??? "The Smithsonian's annual budget is around $1.25 billion, with two-thirds coming from annual federal appropriations."
- dang 2y agoDiscussed a bit at the time (of the article): Why Birds Survived, and Dinosaurs Went Extinct, After an Asteroid Hit Earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488527 - Sept 2020 (3 comments)
- eslaught 2y agoLooks like no one answered this question from the last time around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492646
- mikeyouse 2y agoQ: Anyway, my problem with the argument is that some mammals obviously survived. Why? We had worse lungs, roughly the same amount of protection against the cold as many small dinosaurs... so what gives? A possible answer from this article (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-mammals-conquered-the-world-after-the-asteroid-apocalypse/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-mammals-conqu...) The earliest Paleocene scene is dire. There is a fossil locality in Montana dated to approximately 25,000 years after the asteroid hit, called the Z-Line Quarry. It reeks of death. Almost all the mammals that flourished in the region in the Cretaceous are gone; only seven species remain. Several other fossil sites divulge what was happening over the next 100,000 to 200,000 years. If you pool together all mammals from this time, there are 23 species. Only one of these is a metatherian; these marsupial ancestors, once so abundant in the Cretaceous, were nearly extinguished. All told, if you consider the entire Montana fossil record, along with other data from across western North America, the statistics are grim. A paltry 7 percent of mammals survived the carnage. Imagine a game of asteroid roulette: a gun, with 10 chambers, nine of which hold a bullet. Even those odds of survival are slightly better than what our ancestors faced in the brave new world of the Paleocene. This bleak state of affairs raises a question: What allowed some mammals to endure? The answer became apparent when Wilson Mantilla looked at the victims and survivors. The survivors were smaller than most of the Cretaceous mammals, and their teeth indicate they had generalist, omnivorous diets. The victims, on the other hand, were larger, with more specialized carnivorous or herbivorous diets. They were supremely adapted to the latest Cretaceous world, but when the asteroid unleashed disaster, their adaptations became hardships. The smaller generalists, in contrast, were better able to eat whatever was on offer in the postimpact chaos, and they could have more easily hunkered down to wait out the worst of the bedlam. As ecosystems recovered in the earliest Paleocene, many of the mammals that started to multiply were eutherians, the placental antecedents that were once bit players in the Cretaceous. Their tiny bodies, flexible diets, and perhaps faster ways of growing and reproducing allowed them to commandeer open niches and start building new food webs. Around 100,000 years postasteroid a new eutherian appeared in Montana and swiftly became common. Purgatorius, with gentle molar cusps for eating fruits and highly mobile ankles for clinging and climbing in the trees, was an early member of the primate line. It, or perhaps another closely related eutherian, was our ancestor.
- hwayne 2y agoAfter reading this, my main question changed from "why did birds survive" to "why did crocodiles survive".
- pfdietz 2y agoLow metabolism and they live in fresh water, shielding them from the heating impulse after the impact. Fresh water ecosystems fed by detritus from dead plants could survive the post-impact period of darkness as well.
- lelanthran 2y ago> they live in fresh water, shielding them from the heating impulse after the impact. Does living in the ocean not provide the same benefit?
- ensocode 2y agoso this is why sharks also survived? but why not aquatic saurs?
- holoduke 2y agoDidn't crocodiles evolved two time separately?
- IncreasePosts 2y agoNo? Alligators, ghalials, caimans, and crocs all share a common ancestor ~120MYA that was very similar to all of those species.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago"Gee, I don't know. Maybe deep down I'm afraid of any apex predator that lived through the K-T extinction. Physically unchanged for a hundred million years, because it's the perfect killing machine. A half ton of cold-blooded fury, the bite force of 20,000 Newtons, and stomach acid so strong it can dissolve bones and hoofs." (Archer)
- prmoustache 2y agoI would have thought about fishing before eating seeds tbh.
- jjk166 2y agoIn the aftermath of the extinction food webs collapsed as photosynthesis basically shut down for several years. Birds could find and eat seeds buried before the extinction, which along with their ability to fly long distances meant they could find enough calories to survive in environments that weren't producing any.
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240124195601/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-birds-survived-and-dinosaurs-went-extinct-after-asteroid-hit-earth-180975801/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240124195601/https://www.smith... https://archive.ph/c0hHJ https://archive.ph/c0hHJ
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- empath-nirvana 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps This happened roughly contemporaneously to the asteroid strike.
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- Retric 2y agoYea, possibly overlapping timing and at the opposite side of the earth, suggesting Deccan Traps could be a direct result of the Chicxulub impact.
- sydbarrett74 2y ago[flagged]
- eesmith 2y ago[flagged]
- InitialLastName 2y agoThe urge to a social-media-pedantry-dunk aside, did the title confuse you? Do you think your title or TFA's title gets the point of the article across clearly to a wider audience?
- sydbarrett74 2y agoI'm reacting to what I view as poor science journalism.
- sphuff 2y agoThe first sentence of the article is “Birds are the only dinosaurs left”.
- sydbarrett74 2y agoThe lede is what grabs eyeballs.
- konfusinomicon 2y agodidnt you get the memo??? birds aren't real! and the last surviving dinosaurs who originally ventured into the hollow earth before the disasterous meteor strike, evolved over millions of years and became today's shape shifting lizard people that rule the world with reckless disregard for our mammalian well being
- dboreham 2y agoWe're trying to infer a query here: SELECT species FROM animals WHERE habitat IN [protected_from_burning_sky] AND diet IN [non_photosynthesis_dependant_foods]
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- RajT88 2y agoBirds are dinosaurs: https://www.birdlife.org/news/2021/12/21/its-official-birds-are-literally-dinosaurs-heres-how-we-know/ https://www.birdlife.org/news/2021/12/21/its-official-birds-... A fact I'm reminded of when I spook a stork/heron/crane when I'm walking my dog along the river near me. They make a crazy dinosaur sound, and in flight even resemble somewhat the classic illustrations of Pterosaurs. Bonus link, the common ancestor of both birds and crocodiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archosaur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archosaur
- s0rce 2y agoI think that chickens look like dinosaurs.
- RajT88 2y agoSome mad scientist a while back wanted to devolve Chickens into (basically) velociraptors. This was decades back, but I could see what he's talking about. Apparently with CRISPR now some scientists are doing similar things at small scales.
- elevaet 2y ago> They make a crazy dinosaur sound Do they? Or maybe we base out ideas of what dinosaurs might have sounded like on birds like these... ;)
- adolph 2y agoI’m sure someone will figure out how to reverse engineer the sound recorded in various muds that were in turn fossilized. It’ll probably be something like a soil fungus that left traces of a piezo-materal that when exposed to dinosaur calls emitted energy that raised the probability of the surrounding mud to make some transition. Once we have those calls synthesized we will find out that the so called asteroid impacts were high energy experiments on the part of the Silurians. Humans will attempt the same to a similar result: lather, rinse, repeat.
- magicalist 2y ago
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- nahuel0x 2y agoIs a dark but realistic thought that humanity is being more destructive for the planet ecosystem than the asteroid that killed dinosaurs.
- thejazzman 2y agoBut I find it genuinely uplifting that, despite such awful things, the Earth recovers and life goes on It makes the horrors of today less dire. Maybe sucks for "us" but not life itself. Hopefully.
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