"To the Story of the Last Dinosaurs" Topic

"Why did the non-avian dinosaurs become extinct? There's no shortage of ideas, but no one really knows. And even though paleontologists have narrowed them down to a short list of extinction triggers—including an asteroid strike, massive volcanic outpouring, sea level changes and climate alterations—how these events translated into the extinction of entire clades of organisms remains hotly debated.

One of the most contentious questions is whether dinosaurs thrived right until the end of the Cretaceous, or whether they were already declining before the lights went out. Based on species counts, mostly from the roughly 66-million-year-old rock of western North America's Hell Creek Formation, it might seem that dinosaurs were not quite as diverse as they were in the same area 10 million years earlier. But detecting this decline depends on how species are identified and counted—a quirk affected by how we distinguish dinosaurs and other organisms known only from fossils. If we recognize that Triceratops and Torosaurus were separate dinosaur genera, for example, there were two big ceratopsids present in western North America at the end of the Cretaceous. But if we start from the position that the dinosaurs we call Torosaurus were really the skeletally mature form of Triceratops, then ceratopsid diversity is cut in half. And even the best circumstances, the fossil record is an imperfect catalog of prehistoric life that we are only sampling a few pieces from. Determining diversity by taking species counts is not as simple as it sounds.

In a Nature Communications paper published today, paleontologists Stephen Brusatte, Richard Butler, Albert Prieto-Márquez and Mark Norell take a different approach. Rather than track species and genera, the researchers followed trends in morphological disparity—how the forms of dinosaurs varied across seven major groups, both globally and regionally. Differences in form translate to differences in lifestyle and behavior, mostly avoiding tangled taxonomic arguments, and this technique gauges how many forms of dinosaurs were present at a given time. This is a proxy to detect which groups of dinosaurs might have been thriving and which were declining over time…"
Full article here.
link

Hope you enjoy!.

Amicalement
Armand

One day I hope to go back & see for myself…

asphixiated by methane.

(we're watching you, John)

They didn't die. They left.

I'm not extinct quite yet!

Oh, you meant THOSE dinosaurs……

Armand: you might have better luck introducing deep intellectual and philosophical concepts on a Twilight forum.

I see the Dinosaur Mailing List has a long thread on dinosaur farts. Try that one.