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Dino diminuendo

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Dinosauria montage 2.jpg The dinosaurs, we are now told, were dying out before the asteroid hit.

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic:

Manabu Sakamoto from the University of Reading has shown that dinosaur species were going extinct faster than new ones were appearing, for at least 40 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. The dinosaur opera had already been going through a long diminuendo well before the asteroid ushered in its final coda.

Many other researchers had looked at the fates of the dinosaurs before that infamous extinction event and suggested that they were already declining. But most of these studies had simply tabulated raw numbers of species from different blocks of time. This approach has problems: the rocks from certain time periods may simply be better at preserving fossils, or may have been more intensively scrutinized by fossil-hunters.

Together with Michael Benton and Chris Venditti, he took a recently published family tree, comprising 614 dinosaur species, and modeled the rates at which new species arose and old ones went extinct. “We’re not counting numbers of species throughout the history of dinosaurs, but of speciation events,” he explains. (A speciation event occurs when one species diverges into two.)

If anything, Sakomoto’s study, in revealing the dinosaurs’ slow decline, reminds us about just how long they ruled for—a period of 180 million years, during which many species came and went. More.

Sakamoto’s thesis is contested, of course but it has an explanatory advantage: Groups that dominated the planet for that length of time probably wouldn’t be entirely extinguished by one single event. There must have been other factors.

Colin Patterson suspected that about the trilobites as well. There must have been something that was going wrong for them besides the grand Permian die-off.

Lots of dino interest out there just now:

See also: Dino kin grew more like birds than reptiles

Why weren’t there many dinosaur species?

and

Size helped largest dinos survive longer

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The official story is pretty dramatic:

Comments
"The dinosaurs, we are now told, were dying out before the asteroid hit." There is no "now" about this. When I was at University in the 70s it was well understood that the dinosaurs were in decline long before they went extinct. And this was before the asteroid theory.Indiana Effigy
April 20, 2016
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It was the biblical flood that wiped out everyone on land and sea. Its just incompetent research that concludes there were these geology ages which are the oirigin of the dino fossils. In fact the geology strata was itself just laid by the roaring biblical flood in segregated flow events during the flood year. The bible said there was a wipeout. thats the evidence in the rocks. After the flood a clean/unclean ratio change. Without the geology ideas the whole biology story that proclaim DOES NOT WORK.Robert Byers
April 20, 2016
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Excellent video.Truth Will Set You Free
April 20, 2016
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