Lucky break allowed dinosaurs to rule Earth: study

Reuters ^ | Sep 11, 2008 | Will Dunham

[decimon]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Thanks to a big stroke of luck 200 million years ago, dinosaurs beat out a fearsome group of creatures competing for the right to rule the Earth, scientists said on Thursday.

Dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, during the Triassic Period, and competed for 30 million years with a group of reptiles called crurotarsans, cousins of today's crocodiles that grew to huge sizes and looked a lot like dinosaurs.

[decimon]

"What a croc!", said the alligator.

[decimon]

Balance of scales ping.

[machogirl]

calling matt damon, matt damon (curious as to what gov palin thinks about dino’s existing 4000 years ago.)ping

[decimon]

This images provides a montage of the skulls of several reptiles known as crurotarsans -- cousins of today's crocodiles -- that were the main competitors of dinosaurs from 230 to 200 million years ago during the late Triassic period. Thanks to a big stroke of luck 200 million years ago, dinosaurs beat out a fearsome group of creatures competing for the right to rule the Earth, scientists said on September 11, 2008. (Stephen Brusatte/Columbia University/Handout/Reuters)

[shekkian]

Ohhhh, scientists say so. Well then it must be true.

[Mark319]

I think it’s a little bit funny when scientists say, “dinosaurs APPEARED”...

[Kevmo]

bmflr

[kidd]

...competed for 30 million years ...

30 millions years of no winner is a "tie"

[TASMANIANRED]

It was just a short term trend.

[PeteB570]

That was only round one.

:-)

[count-your-change]

It was during the Thoracic Period that the Red Throated Dinosaurs appeared. Because of heavy smoke from meteorite hits and burning savanna near Georgia their mating calls became too raspy to attract mates. Further it is believed that grains fermented into alcohol in their stomachs and caused the higher brain functions to cease leading to early organ failure.
Geologists say that these skeletons are often found in association with various metallic alloys.
“Further study is needed”, said Dr.s Martini, Daniels and Rossi of The Directorate Uber Imbibealot.

[LiteKeeper]

YEC INTREP

[trebb]

But scientists led by Steve Brusatte of Columbia University and American Museum of Natural History in New York conducted an extensive review of fossils and found that the two groups were evolving at roughly the same pace and the crurotarsans actually had a larger range of body types, diets and lifestyles.

And that is why the "liberals" will never win their unholy battle - history already has them down as the losers in the competition!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks decimon.

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[SunkenCiv]

· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic ·
	Gods Graves Glyphs	Paging Professor Twist. crurotarsans, cousins of today's crocodiles Crocodiles uno, dinosaurs nada. Thanks decimon. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[Centurion2000]

More images of this interesting little reptile branch.

WOW .... that's a big damn gator. Purussaurus : Miocene (not Triassic but still REALLY cool)

Mourasuchus : baleen toothed crocadile : Miocene period, Cenozoic era

Stomatosuchus : Miocene

[Fred Nerks]

SUPERCROC

From the blistering sands of the Sahara, paleontologist Paul Sereno has pulled an incredible find: the nearly complete remains of Sarcosuchus imperator, one of the largest crocodilians to ever walk the Earth.

As long as a city bus, and weighing in at about ten tons, “SuperCroc” lives up to its nickname.

Sarcosuchus imperator, or “flesh crocodile emperor,” lived roughly 110 million years ago, when rivers coursed over what is now sub-Saharan Africa. Sarcosuchus prowled the rivers’ banks, crushing fish—and other creatures—in its massive jaws.

Sarcosuchus

Sarcosuchus imperator had more than a hundred teeth. Unlike today’s crocodilians, SuperCroc’s skull grew wider toward the front of its snout, which was studded with a row of enlarged incisors. These bone-crushers, Sereno says, indicate Sarcosuchus could eat far meatier prey than fish.

Desert-Adapted Crocs Found in Africa.

The desert crocodiles have adapted to the changing environment in northern Africa; 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, what is now desert was probably lush savannah and grasslands. Today the Sahara is hot and arid, the land sandy, rainfall minimal, and vegetation sparse...

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks, great pictures as always.

[1999 -- The letter of rejection from Nature for the following article is dated August 28, 1968. At the time most earth scientists would not even accept the fact that meteorites regularly impacted the earth. For example, Barringer Crater in Arizona was still thought by many to be of volcanic origin, as well as the craters on the moon. Bob Dietz had just published his work on shatter cones but I wouldn't say that had been generally accepted. There was not even general agreement on sea floor spreading and plate tectonics outside the radical few at Scripps, Woods Hole, and related institutions.]

Possible Formation of the Guatemala Basin by the Impact of an Extraterrestrial Body
by Charles E. Corry and Miller L. Bell

The earth must be as frequently cratered per unit area as the moon. By a relative cross section argument, more than 13 times the number of craters the size of the maria on the moon exist, or existed, on the earth. Whether such events occur with sufficient frequency in recent geologic time to provide tangible evidence today of such cratering is uncertain. From the arguments set forth, and the continuing discovery of meteorite craters on the continents (Short, 1966, Baldwin, 1963, Dietz, 1961, and Prouty, 1952) it seems likely that the importance of the effect of extraterrestrial bodies impacting the earth has been, at least, underestimated (the Alverez's hypothesis concerning the end of the dinosaurs by such a mechanism was more than a decade in the future). Certainly there is as much evidence at present to support our hypothesis for the formation of the Guatemala Basin as other hypotheses advanced to explain the low heat flow found in this basin.

With the tests for shock processes advanced by Short (1966), our hypothesis should be capable of field verification or rejection.

New Dino Species Found on Dusty Shelf
by John Pickrell
July 10, 2003

The two-ton (1.8 metric ton) species of sauropod, previously unknown to science, is the oldest known ancestor to lumbering herbivorous giants such as the well-known brachiosaurs of the Jurassic... The 215 million-year-old specimen, named Antetonitrus ingenipes, is significantly older than any previously known sauropod, a class of plant-eating dinosaurs with four legs and long necks... While Antetonitrus was larger than any land animal living today and its contemporaries, it pales in comparison to the monumental dinosaurs that would follow millions of years later.

New Extinction Clues Point to Deep Impact
by Paul Recer
May 10, 2001

New evidence shows that an extinction event in which more than half of all Earth species died 200 million years ago happened quickly, possibly as a result of an impact from outer space. The extinction, at the boundary of the Triassic and Jurassic periods of geologic history, is similar in its suddenness to two extinction events that have been linked to space rocks' impacts on the Earth. Researchers analyzing deposits from a rock formation on a remote beach front in Canada found evidence of a sharp shift in organic carbon levels at precisely the point in time that the Triassic-Jurassic extinction occurred. This is the first time scientists have found a clear carbon signature for what is called the TJ event, said Peter D. Ward, a researcher at the University of Washington... Similar evidence has been found for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, and for the much earlier Permian extinction 250 million years ago that killed 90 percent of all species... If the researchers find evidence that a space rock impact caused the TJ extinction, it will mean that three of the five major extinctions in the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth are linked to the impact of asteroids or comets... Ward said that no impact crater on Earth has been shown to have a proven link to the TJ extinction event, although the Manicougan Crater in Quebec is considered a candidate. That crater was caused by a space impact, but it has been dated at 214 million years, well before the TJ event.

[Fred Nerks]

Possible Formation of the Guatemala Basin by the Impact of an Extraterrestrial Body

by Charles E. Corry and Miller L. Bell

Charles E. Corry

Achievements

Overturned paradigm that had existed for over 150 years regarding galvanic current flow in ore bodies; discovery that ore minerals are commonly ferroelectrics and that ore bodies behave as a polarized dielectric medium, or solid plasma, in electrical surveys; development of the controlled-source audiomagnetotelluric (CSAMT) method for electrical exploration; field and theoretical studies of magmatic intrusions; terrestrial heat flow studies in the North Pacific, coordination of the hydrographic program of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, relational database design and data modeling...

Thanks!

discovery that ore minerals are commonly ferroelectrics and that ore bodies behave as a polarized dielectric medium, or solid plasma, in electrical surveys...

Electric Universe! Did you tell Swordmaker?

[SunkenCiv]

Well, SM is in the Catastrophism ping list, so...