Dinosaur Disaster Doubts

The Telegraph (UK) reported today on new findings about the dinosaurs.

The traditional telling of the apocalyptic story goes as follows: the dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, until an asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico 65 million years ago that triggered a mass extinction that allowed the ancestors of today’s mammals to thrive, paving the way for the rise of man.

The asteroid part of the story is still true, but a study published today in the journal Nature challenges the oft held belief that the demise of the dinosaurs played a major role in the rise of our ancient ancestors, suggesting global warming and the appearance of flowers could have been much more important.

Well, of course the appearance of flowers would be important! How else could a caveman get a cavegirl to go out on a date with him? They didn't have boxes of chocolates back then. No, the flowers meant he could get a girl, and that would "pave the way for the rise of man." So to speak. And that meant there could be little cavebabies coming along later...

But that's not all the news in this story. It gets even better.

There was a small pulse of mammalian diversification immediately after the dinosaur die-off. However, most of these groups have since either died out completely, such as Andrewsarchus , a species of Mesonychid (extinct group of aggressive wolf-like cows), or declined in diversity, such as the group containing sloths and armadillos.

The researchers believe that our 'ancestors’, and those of all other mammals on earth now, radiated - diversified into new species - in two pulses. The first was about 30 million years before the dinosaurs died out.

Flowering plants radiated then too, possibly aiding the diversification of mammals by giving them new things to eat.

The second pulse was not until 10 million years after the end of the dinosaurs, around the time of a sudden increase in the temperature of the planet - known as the Cenozoic thermal maximum.

Around 55 million years ago, the mid-latitude mean annual temperatures went up by up to 5 deg C over about 20,000 years. “It was a much bigger increase in temperature than we’ve had so far, but within the range that we might get within the next century (never mind 20,000 years),” said Prof Andy Purvis from Imperial College London.

It looks like a later bout of 'global warming’ may have kick-started today’s diversity - not the death of the dinosaurs.

So now what are the environmentalists supposed to do? They can complain about how bad mankind is for allowing the extinction of various species (as though that never happened without us--can you say, "aggressive wolf-like cows"?). And they can complain about how bad mankind is for allowing global warming to happen.

But if global warming contributed to that second pulse of species diversity back in the Cenozoic era, wouldn't they really want that to happen again, now that it might be possible?

Shout it with me:

Global warming for diversity!