Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

Don't know -- just suddenly disappeared. Like the dinosaurs.

I don't know that the dinosaurs disappeared all that suddenly Wiz. I daresay wasps will disappear a lot faster than they did.

Perhaps RL has seen the light and become a born again atheist.. Or perhaps he can't find his way outa the confessional box.. Then again he could be over in Iran teaching Christian religion.

Wasps, huh. I agree the human kind are going to disappear faster than the dinosaurs. Otherwise, actual insects are the most endurable life on the planet and survived the dinosaurs.

I vote for the confessional box for RL. He's eternally trapped there now, reciting all the absurdities he posted on A2K. The priest has fallen asleep months ago.

Interesting that wasps and dinosaurs appeared just about together in the fossil record and that wasps have outlasted them by an additional 65 million years.

It's not funny Wiz. He provided evidence that insects and mites and whatnot are better survivors that the big dicks. It's nothing to be happy about.

Yes, shouldn't be happy that you are a better survivor, in the true vernacular of "big dicks." But a mix of sensible heads and lowly trolls from across the pond in the island kingdom are inevitable.

It's patently obvious that evolution exists however, what existed before evolution. What existed before the big bang. If your answer is God, then who created God????

Nobody. He was, is and always will be.

What's infinity plus 10%?

I'm particularly disappointed that the ammonites disappeared along with the dinosaurs (except the birds). You would have thought that deep sea animals would have survived a prolonged meteor induced cold snap, but I guess not.

It's possible that their food source was profoundly, disasterously affected.

I would assume so. Or in a more general sense, that their environment was affected. Maybe it was water temperature? Or maybe it was the light level? Both possible, but a food chain break seems more likely.

I wonder what they were eating?

I would suspect that the food chain's most vulnerable portion is the bottom, the base of the pyramid. Krill (or krill-like creatures) and single-cell organism colonies could collapse in a heartbeat.

I think most cephalopods today eat mid-range reef organism including fish and shrimp and crabs. I think their diet is fairly diverse, which would make them slightly more robust with regard to food chain problems than if they were extremely specialized. Maybe the ammonites had a much more specialized diet.

Most ammonites were only a few inches across, but some were very large.

I understand that part--what i am suggesting is that collapse might have "rolled up" the food chain from below. After all, if a species lingered on for a few years, or a few dozen years, or even a century or so before succumbing, we would not be able to distinguish that from the fossil record. The smallest organisms i would think have the least resistance to the effect of a significant alteration in sunlight levels at the water's surface, or annual, global mean temperature.

I wasn't really disagreeing. Other sources I've found also agree that the "plankton" was hard-hit at the KT boundary.

I'm just finding it interesting to speculate about ammonites for a while It's amazing to picture 6ft diameter "nautilus like" things swimming around in the ocean, catching things for food. I still wonder what they ate and how they caught it.

If they were floating around in the mid-waters and eating fish, then they must have had a "quick catch" mechanism, or a lure of some type. Cuttlefish have a couple of fast tentacles they can "shoot" out to catch prey. Maybe the large ammonites had something like that too.

There are several other theories of ammonoid extinction. The most popular has to do with their styles of reproduction, which was a "release bazillion eggs and send some clown to jerk off over them" Hopfully something will stick
Nautiloids produce krger and fewer eggs that are in protected egg cases. So whenever the sea change was chemically significant, the ammonites and belemnites gradually went extinct in the mid to upperK. Remember too that the Upper K was in the middle of the split off of Pangea and currents changed in the mid ocean latitudes.
Most of the ammonite/belemnite extinction is still being looked at carefully because there were 4 main groups of these animals since the Jurassic to the Upper K . BUT, there were almost 100 separate genera. They, like the Foraminiferans diverged quickly and in response to major differences in environments that occured through time.

The two genera of the big Ammonites, the actinoceroides and the Michelonoceroids (and some say the Nipponaoceroids which were not "rolled " looking but were kind of 3-d piled up masses of tubes that occured at the same time as the other two). Michelin and ACtino were very similar and occured at either end of the opening Tethys sea. SO these two giants were actually related by their mother species. They lived in areas that were over deeper sea zones (like fossil trench deposits).

You could earn a PhD with "oak leaf clusters" if you solve and unify the Ammonite /Belemnite cladogram problems.

We use em because they are great "index fossils".An index fossil is one that has a short temporal existence but a wide geographic range. They help us correlate ages and environments of sediment stratigraphy.

It's unfortunate that the soft-body portion of the ammonites didn't fossilize. Do we even really know what these things looked like, or do we just infer that they looked like Nautiloids?