Posted on 07/15/2003 9:27:32 PM PDT by Mike Darancette
Auckland - The dinosaurs were probably heading for extinction even before an asteroid strike wiped them out 65 million years ago, New Zealand scientists said on Monday.
Palaeontologist Chris Hollis and a team of scientists from the government-owned Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) have uncovered evidence of significant global climate change even before the meteor strike.
"An unknown number of species may have been in sharp decline when the asteroid struck and the impact winter probably finished them off quite quickly," Hollis said in a statement.
He added: "There's no scientific agreement on what caused this climatic instability, but it's quite likely that current studies are over-estimating the effect of the asteroid impact."
By studying fossils and sediments at six sites in New Zealand, the research team found a centimetre thick layer of meteorite dust formed precisely at the time of major environmental change 65 million years ago.
They also found abrupt changes in microscopic plants and animal fossils in marine sediments.
This supports the idea that the main effect of the asteroid was to throw up a global dust cloud that blocked out the sun for months or even years.
But the cool climate that prevailed in New Zealand for millions of years after the strike might not be, as some had supposed, evidence of a prolonged "impact winter".
"Instead, it may represent a return to normality following unusual warming at the end of the Mesozoic," Hollis said.
At around the time of the impact, toward the end of the Mesozoic period, the planet's climate was changing rapidly with a period of long-term cooling.
But the scientists believe there had been unusually warm conditions just before the impact.
"The warming may have allowed a final flourishing of some species that were already on the path to extinction."
The reappearance of several survivor species after the impact shows that, even though the effects were global, the survival rate of species in New Zealand was higher than in the northern hemisphere.
Because New Zealand was about 1 500km closer to Antarctica at the time, the local flora and fauna were probably adapted to cold and darkness and therefore better able to withstand an impact winter.
GNS earlier said its study of evidence in New Zealand suggests that the destruction of forests because of the impact winter was largely confined to the American continent, within a radius of several thousand kilometres of the suspected site on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Copyright 2003, Sapa-AFP
Maybe the point is that the Dinosaurs were already on the verge of surrendering...
And it is very possible that references to dragons was another name for dinosaurs - especially since the word "dinosaur" is of very recent origin.
Take a good pair of binoculars outside some night and take a good look at the full Moon.
The craters you see are where large objects have struck the Moon over time. During that same time period over 4 times as many large objects have struck the Earth.
On a scale of Geologic time these events happen quite a lot.
Au Contrare!
The "scientists" are saying that it wasn't flaming fire from the skies, but Global Climate Change!
Reinforced by "historical evidence" of catastrophic global climate change, the present scientific fallacy can (and will) go on. (properly funded, of course.)
It is, after all, logical to assume that global catastrophe in the past proves the probability of global "warming" catastrophe in our future.
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