[null and void]

*sigh* Worms live in burrows, fish did't need to surface through a scalding hot layer to breathe. And as you say carrion eaters had one hell of a barbecue to tide them over until the rat population exploded.

It was a very rough time. Nothing great survived, and only a small fraction of the small did, but how many ship escaping rats does it take to ultimately overrun an island?

Does a conflagration kill all the moles? Does it kill all the tubers and seeds?

And Wendy? The ostrich ancestors didn't weigh 30 or 40 lbs, they also flew. Being small swift and airborne is only important when you'll be eaten by larger predators.

As soon as there weren't any larger predators flying became less important, a critter could stay on the ground and get a meal without becoming a meal.

In a world of little critters, a slightly bigger critter has better odds of attracting the ladies getting the lions's share of the food, and leaving descendants.

All the ecological niches filled by large dinos are empty. Nature abhors a vacuum.

[count-your-change]

A nice story for the History channel but the reality? It doesn't fit. Where is the evidence for a massive die off of birds? or insects? Even dino diarrhea has been proposed along with every other imaginable cause, poison gas, volcanoes, cosmic rays, climate change. Just so.