Dinosaur Fossil Found in Mammal's Stomach

This sort of talk is why I will never leave this forum.

Yeh , theres a KT boundary, but originally it was a stratigraphic change (an unconformity). The data for the meteorite came from WAlter Alvarez (Louis son) who , together with his dad, found a bunch of rare earths beside iridium in a clay layer in Italy. Iridium was a key element though. Soon , many scientists began finding Iridium in their KT samples, and guys like Gould and Raup and Poag began saying that , hey isnt it amazing that this layer marks the end of dinosaurs and a few other classes of animals\ So,then there was an age of Post hoc- science where, because the iridium layer, probably caused by a meteor, existed. It soon became the RESPONSIBLE agent for all the
dinos dying. Reality showed that , all over the world, fossils of dinosaurs were already becoming way scarce in the sediments leading up to the KT. In fact , there are no KT border dinosaurs. All dinos appeared to be dead BEFORE the meteorite evidence

Statistically , yad think that if all these dinosaurs were croaked by a meteor, some of them would at least have the courtesy of being fossilized AT the boundary.
Walter Alvarez then wrote a popular book called "T REX and THE CRATER OF DOOM". How could you pass that up? . It was a good read, it was a good scientific detective story.(I used it as an assigned reading in one of my undergrad classes-the kids loved it and , since they were majors, they saw the important lesson of cooperation in really big finds-The Chixclub was about cooperation as well as the evils of competition in field sciences)
The book never did make a great case for the meteor being the cause of the dino deaths and the mass extinction. This just sort of happened as an embarrasing event that I blame more on the popular writers like the Nick WAdes. To those writers, all science has to be made exciting for our American spans of attention
The mass of ordinary field paleontologists who work for surveys and museums and universities around the world kept plugging away with their data. They knew that very much of waht WAlter wrote was meant for entertainment and not science. Now, a more balanced HYPOTHESIS about the mixed causes that include climatologic and ecological chnages as well as continents drifting at about 2 cm /year ( some , like India actually moved at 3 times that speed).

Im really glad that the true story has been corrupted by human fiddling, because there will ultimately come a real book of how the science and the entertainment came together for a 20 year association that resulted in much funding for private field institutions and people becoming interested in things like evolution and geneticists took on evolutionary biology to see how fossil lines and genetic linneages compared.

I went "yay" when I saw farmerman as the most recent poster here.

Yeah, the whole lotta things coming together is what makes the most sense to me on my kid-book crash course.

I had a vague notion having to do with the new evidence that T-Rex was a scavenger -- body parallel to ground, those useless little legs -- and how he was one of the last big carnovores (well meat-eaters -- do carnivores have to catch their food?) and a long long die-off, but I don't remember. I need to go to bed.

This stuff is so cool tho.

Herw is the link to Sinornithosaurus


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinornithosaurus

I forget. Why aren't you and bobsmy the consultants for this book?

Joe(huh? Well? ) Nation

Hi Joe and thanks for the vote. Compared to Farmerman though I'm an untutored savage. I'll bet Farmerman could write that book though. And I'd love to see him do it. If you saw the list of credits that scientists wade through to eke out an acceptable book it's staggering. My base of knowledge is not broad enough to be acceptable to experts in that genre.

Joe and Bob, Im really not a good writer. Writing techn ically is easy, its like editing a phone book, you just have to get your facts strait.


Many scientists are now publishing outside of the normal tech venue lately. They team with real writers and publish their works in an efoort to be more readable. James Watsons DNA book was such a collaboration.
The result was interesting and informative.
Richard Quammen is a writer who, lacking heavy technical training, used this fact to his advantage and has written some really good nature (evolution) books that supply the "FAQs" of science in an entertaining fashion.

Joe-you write like a pro. I dont know about whether you are or not, but you have the talent to just get to the sore spot really quickly. I read your posts and feelfull after finishing them , Ive gotten an oopinion and been informed AND, entertained in a way that doesnt insult. Thats a gift.

Bob-your enthusiasm for nature comes through in any post you lay down. I am similarly satisfied cause you provide the main point and some side dishes of information. And you never talk down to people. You are a good writer.
My only talent, besides geo and watercolors, is being able to note what others are good at .

My problem is that,whenever I lock up in a thread about evolution or even chemistry, I get annoyed at the(at least to me) inability of many people to "get"the facts of science. Like they think that the results of much of the science research is still open to serious debate. I find myself getting angry and then I get insulting and then I lose whatever credibility Ive built.

H F Osborne used to write like that. He was a pompous SOB on paper (he had the good sense to die many decades before my birth).
Id love to be a writer about the subject of how a "freight train" mentality in many areas of science has developed over the years for many subjects.
The many subjects like the "Cambrian Explosion", or the "Fake human fossil era", The crazy creation v evolution issue as a political movement, meteors and mass extinctions, Velikohvsky and plate tectonics, etc
All these would make interesting , funny books if written by someone who isnt burdened by all the technical crap.

Not one, eh? That is suspicious and interesting stuff. Can you recommend a book that I can offer Mr.P?

There are many lay people who are busy with their own lives & careers who want to know (I don't know why...) the facts -- the real science. They'll read what is available, choosing what they hope is the output from authors who are grounded in fact. Of course, since some theories have ebbed & flowed, it can be hard to keep up if you've been reading for many years and have wide-ranging interests.

Here, for example, is one of my theories based on a long-ago learned "fact" that buttercups (among other plants) were found in the digestive systems of some of the frozen Mammoths. Nobody ever mentioned it in the books I read, but to me, that suggests they were starving. I have never known a horse or cow to eat a buttercup on purpose. Of course, horses & mammoths may have different ideas of what is good. What do you think?

buttercups are quite tasty. I never thought about it much , but Id tend to agree that an elephant, whose eating habits are designed toward browsing , would really be short for nutrition if they ate some crappy little weeds like buttercups. Hard getting enough in there for a full meal. Maybe buttercups , being seasonal were a hold over food, sort of got the mammoth over the hump to when leaves would be budding in the low trees. Of course they also ate grasses too.
Thatd be a good topic for a thesis and it could be done by those students who dont like field work.

Some good reads are W Glenns-The mass extinction debates (1994) Stanford press
and ,on the meteor side , Dick Jablonski on "Body size and macroevolution" in, Evolutionary Paleobiology Chi Univ Press (1996-Im not sure of the date but its close)

Thanks, for the titles. I found this nice website which has a free pdf edition of The Mass Extinction Debates in case anyone else wants to look at it. ----NEVERMIND -- when I went to print out the pdf, it turns out I need a $$$ subscription. <grump> Not so nice as I thought.
GSA Journals

I am surprised that the ickiness of buttercups isn't noted in association with mammoths. Maybe not that many were actually found with them in their systems? It seemed so hard on the big guys... forced to eat buttercups.

Horse Poisoning -- Buttercups