Dinosaur Extinction Rewritten Again
Who will go back and fix the animations?
If the Chicxulub meteor finished off the dinosaurs, they were already on the edge anyway, a new theory proposes. The BBC News says dinosaurs were on the decline 50 million years before the impact. And why was that? With apologies to Bob Dylan, “A team suggests the creatures were in long-term decline because they could not cope with the ways Earth was changing.” Yes, music lovers, the times they were a-changing, just like climate change afflicts us today. “Your sons and your daughters /
Are beyond your command,” Darwin told T. rex. “Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin’.” T. rex didn’t have much of a hand to lend anyway. Climate change had determined that it was time for the mammals to take center stage.
The asteroid impact is commonly thought to have paved the way for mammals to take over. But the new study suggests that mammalian supremacy might have occurred eventually, without a space impact.
Co-author Prof Mike Benton of Bristol University, told BBC News: “World climates were getting cooler all the time. Dinosaurs rely on quite warm climates and mammals are better adapted to the cold.
“So there might have been a switch over in any case without the asteroid impact.“
“Might” makes right in evolutionary storytelling; the power of suggestion raises the perhapsimaybecouldness index. Earth needed to make “room for mammals,” Science Daily says. What better way than to chill out the dinos?
Those interested in the case for dino decline can look at the paper in PNAS. It begins, “Whether dinosaurs were in decline before their final extinction 66 Mya has been debated for decades with no clear resolution.” But by using a “Bayesian phylogenetic approach to model the evolutionary dynamics of speciation and extinction through time,” they guarantee an evolutionary outcome (see DIGO in the Darwin Dictionary).
Back to the Drawing Board
This is most unfortunate for Darwinians, since they thought they finally had a flag up the pole everyone could salute: an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. A team is even out there right now trying to drill into the impact site in the Yucatan. Is their work in vain? Not completely; the new study has a partial role for the impact, just not a complete one. It just gave dinosaurs the final shove.
Brian Switek on National Geographic took the opportunity to review past “wild ideas” about the death of the dinosaurs. First, though,
Here’s his list of previous “crazy conjectures” that came and went:
- Dinosaurs put too much energy into being big and spiky.
- They had a predetermined lifetime as a species, and time was up.
- They developed slipped discs.
- Their hormones got out of control.
- Their sex drives declined.
- They all got sick.
- They were afflicted with cataracts and couldn’t see the mammals taking over.
- They were just stupid.
- Caterpillars ate all the vegetation.
- They took up smoking [actually, that was Gary Larson’s theory on The Far Side]
Before the laughing is over, Switek admits that the impact theory has problems of its own:
While the giant impact is the most likely weapon in this ancient murder case, we know surprisingly little about how the strike translated into widespread death and destruction. Paleontologists have debated aspects of the impact’s ecological fallout ranging from blazing wildfires to an impenetrable cloud of debris in the atmosphere.
But exactly what happened and how such environmental shocks would have killed some species while sparing others is still up for debate.
Will future paleontologists consider the impact theory just another crazy conjection? Not likely; it has too much momentum to not survive this latest crisis. Previous studies, after all, had suggested the dinosaurs were not in decline; they were doing just fine up till the day of destruction. Others promote their pet theory that volcanoes did it. A new theory claims a “trickle of food” kept deep sea creatures alive during the catastrophe (Science Daily). That, however, doesn’t explain the land animals that survived. Whatever the theory, it has to explain the selective extinction of particular reptiles on land (dinosaurs), in the ocean (plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs) and in the air (pterosaurs), while leaving mammals, birds and everything else able to carry on amidst all the carrion.
Selective Outrage
Speaking of climate change, the lead paleontologist promoting the new extinction theory found a way to blame humans. “Our study strongly indicates that if a group of animals is experiencing a fast pace of extinction more so than they can replace, then they are prone to annihilation once a major catastrophe occurs,” Dr. Manabu Sakamoto preaches. “This has huge implications for our current and future biodiversity, given the unprecedented speed at which species are going extinct owing to the ongoing human-caused climate change.” Those wishing to hear some diversity in opinion may wish to see Dr. Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of atmospheric science at MIT, explain the current climate change debate in a short video on Prager University.
Why is it, incidentally, that the scientific consensus is so intent on blaming the current apex predator (humans) for climate change, but never accuses the dinosaurs of the same ecological sin? Maybe they passed too much greenhouse gas. And why are impacts so bad, if they kickstarted life on Earth? (see Christian Schroeder thank comets for life on The Conversation).
How Many Dinosaurs?
Most dinosaur species are still undiscovered, Brian Switek says in another National Geographic piece. In a PLoS Paleo Blog, Jon Tennant shows diagrams from a new study that tries to count the species we know. Based on ecological models, researchers think we have probably found far less than half of the dinosaur species that existed—unless you count birds, which Tennant considers “just mostly a bit smaller and fluffier than their Mesozoic ancestors.”
Evolutionists have a love/hate attitude about impacts. Asteroids and comets bring life, but they also destroy life. They do whatever the storyteller needs them to do; that’s why they are so useful for professional storytellers like Darwinians.
The Flood model does a better job explaining (1) the selectivity of the extinction, (2) world-wide observations by humans of dinosaurs after the Flood, (3) the high level of intelligent design in dinosaur anatomy. But since it is not atheistic/materialistic, it cannot get traction in the Big Science cabal.
Comments
When people hear about how an impact from an asteroid took out all the dinosaurs, or for that matter would take out all of us — I think they are understandably skeptical (at least, I am).
We are often told only a mile wide or so asteroid would cause catastrophic damage, or that some Volcano could erupt and blot out the sky.. But then when we see these calamaties actually occur (Mt. St. Helens for example… the Chernobyl disaster for example) the results are far less severe than claimed.
So.. why should we trust their analysis? If anything we should assume they are wrong based on past results — and ACTUAL examples of what similar impacts / explosions / radioactive events cause. No “nuclear winter”, no clouds blotting out the sun. Yes, that might be the case with a sufficiently large impact… but their math is misleading them. They make models based on the amount of energy released, and their computer goes wild with streams of numbers… and they get out their “end is nigh” signs.
It’s not likely that it took out the dinosaurs.. or for that matter even had a measurable effect but on the local population.
I’ve been following for some time their backtracking on the asteroid-god-obliterating-dinos-by-itself theory. For the past couple of years and even recently, more and more is being said about volcanism, with many fossils being discovered in compressed volcanic ash turned into stone. The Deccan and Siberian Traps are cited as massive examples of an extinction cause which also triggered violent climate and weather anomalies. But they realize there had to be a trigger for all these things to cause massive tectonic uplift and grand scale volcanism, and the answer goes back to Asteroid or Comet–which while not actually caused extinction, did set off the trigger.
This is funny, so let’s recap. Mechanisms for extinction event were volcanoes (springs of the watery deep broken open) which triggered massive climate change and destruction (floodgates of the heavens opened up) but all caused by an extraterrestrial source. Does get any better than this? Odd that this same description was provided a few thousand years ago.
“The Flood model does a better job explaining… the high level of intelligent design in dinosaur anatomy.”
David, in your high level of genius, would you please explain the mechanism here that you claim.
Reflectory;
– I might be wrong, but I think he meant the biblical creation model.
– I don’t personally see how there can be a ‘naturalistic’ (uniformitarian) explanation for why dinosaurs all died out from an impact, but alligators and crocodiles (etc.) didn’t.
– As Max Tegmark allegedly said, ”Perhaps an anomaly this large is a reason to believe that the universe is ‘just’ a computer simulation.”