Archaeologica.org

True! If you wipe out 99% of the Elephants you probably wipe out the Elephant as a species. Wipe out 99% of the House Mouse and there are probably more Mice left than the total world population of Elephants.
But still the absence of fossils bothers me considerably.

I don't think I explained my earlier idea very well.

Let me try it this way. Assuming that the iridium layer was formed by fallout from the blast/impact that would mean that it was initially blasted well up into the atmosphere, much like volcanic ash which can cause spectacular sunsets a year or two afterwards.

Living animals, mainly meaning the ones who were not killed outright by the blast, fire, tidal wave or shock wave would have had to adapt to new conditions. They would also have to keep eating while the iridium layer was slowly forming by settling out of the sky. If that process took more than a couple of weeks many of the survivors would have starved to death but the KT boundary would be forming around them. The 65 mya date is a nice convenient round number but it is, after all, an estimate. If the conditions described in a nuclear winter are accurate it seems reasonable that there would have been no dinosaurs left a mere five years later. How do you represent five years in geologic terms?

How do you represent five years in geologic terms?

The simple answer of course is that you can't Min. So in fact the two events could be just as easily have been separated by a few thousand years.
Every proposed sequence of events following the impact even I can contest with facts and logic. One cause I saw proposed recently was that the wild fires that some say followed the impact, and others dispute, was a massive rise in the CO2 levels and the Dinos choked to death. Rubbish! Birds are one of the greatest users of O2 and energy and the most sensitive to aerial pollution, hence their use as indicators in mines. They survived!

Minimalist wrote:
How do you represent five years in geologic terms?

In mere millimeters.

Birds are one of the greatest users of O2 and energy and the most sensitive to aerial pollution, hence their use as indicators in mines. They survived!

But were there birds, or just small nimble dinosaurs who evolved into birds?

I'll check on that Min, but if my memory serves me correctly then yes, and common sense says, (I'll check), that the small nimble Dinos were still around at the same time, deepening the mystery.
Bakker, I think it was, said there was a 50kg cut off, those heavier perished, those lighter survived. Sounds too simplistic to me.

Digit wrote:I'll check on that Min, but if my memory serves me correctly then yes, and common sense says, (I'll check), that the small nimble Dinos were still around at the same time, deepening the mystery.
Bakker, I think it was, said there was a 50kg cut off, those heavier perished, those lighter survived. Sounds too simplistic to me.

In the absence of any further explanation/reasoning – let alone evidence – that is definitely too simplistic.

Afaik your small, nimble dino's were there at the event, as well as feathered, flying, dino-birds.
As were mammals, reptilians, insects, invertebrates, etc. The big majority perished.

If memory serves me correctly the 50kg limit was on a mammal extinction event the same that saw the end of the camels in north america i think though could be wrong,
As for the comet strike etc KT event that saw the dinosaurs leave us it was established that in India more than ten thousand years after the event Tricerotops still flourished and are counted as the last of the large dinosaurs to die out.

Thanks FT. Nuff said!

fossiltrader wrote:If memory serves me correctly the 50kg limit was on a mammal extinction event the same that saw the end of the camels in north america i think though could be wrong,
As for the comet strike etc KT event that saw the dinosaurs leave us it was established that in India more than ten thousand years after the event Tricerotops still flourished and are counted as the last of the large dinosaurs to die out.

"It was established"?
By whom? When? Where? How?
Got links to support this posit, FT?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triceratops Triceratops lived in North America. That's a loooong way from India...!

Wiki has a report on it RS.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/ ... wen1b.html

This confirms all that I had argued and offers some realistic solutions and also explains how some of the weirder ideas came about, interesting.

"Interesting" is a good word for it.