Obsolete Dinosaurs Extinguished In Anguish by Blossoming Mammals, Newer, Better, More Energized. Same Fate For Smaller Brained Demoncrats?
[The science in this essay is real (although the thesis proposed is new, as far as I know). However, the science is used to generate a sarcastic analogy in the last few sentences.]
My opinion about the main cause for the disappearance of dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, etc. is that what I call “core volcanism”, also known as super Traps. Massive hyper volcanism, with ejecta of the order of 10,000 times that of the proverbial asteroid, changed the climate durably when the Dekkan Traps started to erupt (millions of years before an asteroid hit Yucatan, future base of the Maya). Weirdly, the Dekkan Traps eruption reached its paroxysm around the time of the asteroid strike (the detailed timing of what exactly happened when is ever more refined, every year). However dinosaurs and their cousins were made for a warm Jurassic climate (the sort we, the fossil carbon burners are trying to implement in the next 100 years). Dinosaurs and their ilk had insufficient temperature generation capability, something birds and mammals, being of a much higher metabolism, due to their much greater internal heat generation, had plenty of.
Mammalian reptiles appeared 250 million years ago or so. Full mammals are more than 3% of the age of the Earth old. Large ( meter long or more) carnivorous mammals existed already 150 million years ago, around the time birds diverged from dinosaurs.
Mesozoic Repenomamus, about one meter long were found with dinosaurs in their stomach:
An Early Case of Advanced Types Devouring Demoncrats? Furry Repenomamus Mammals Hunting for Dinosaur Prey during the Early Cretaceous Period of Europe. Mesozoic Era, 122 Million Years Ago.
So picture this: climate cools, dinosaurs, which were spread from the poles to the equator, have increasing difficulties, the number of their species go down. How come dinosaurs could not adapt? Probably because mammals and birds ate them, or their young.
Mammals and birds may well have been a complicating factor in the change of fauna at the end of the Cretaceous. Mammals and birds, capable of sustaining higher metabolism in cooler climes turned a near-extinction into a full extinction. They were a catalyst accelerating the reaction. This is supported by direct scientific evidence, not just philosophy. Some Cretaceous mammals fed on juvenile dinosaurs. It does not require much imagination to figure out that massive carnivorous mammals, whose fossils have been found, had been into that habit for already 100 million years when dinosaurs croaked terminally.
Some may sneer: they don’t know enough. Mammaliaformes are actually 225 million years old. They had evolved from large brained ancestors descending from mammalian reptiles which, themselves, evolved from Synapsids. Synapsids were the largest terrestrial vertebrates in the Permian period, 299 to 251 million years ago. (Large Synapsids were annihilated by the Siberian Traps eruption… however those among synapsids which had become bigger brained, and more prone to make burrows did survive… Thus big braininess in mammalian ancestors was established 251 million years ago…)
In the Jurassic, mammals tended to occupy the niche of smallness. Not that they were terrified by the dinosaurs and tried to make themselves as small as possible, like Trump voters terrified of rampaging demonocrats. More simply, I guess, dinosaurs could not make themselves very small, as they would lose too much heat. So anything smaller than a chicken was a mammal, or the soon to evolve birds.
What sort of philosophy to extract from all of this? Brains and higher metabolism, higher energy lifestyle, can overwhelm the more primitive forms. Extinction itself is multicausal: maybe if neither birds nor mammals (nor sharks or sea-going crocs) had been around, dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and mosasaurs would have survived the considerable climate cooling at the end of the Cretaceous.
Demoncrats and plutocrats are whining all over as they (correctly) fear going extinct. Asteroid Trump has landed, the climate was changing already anyway, disaster looms for these primitive forms. Flushed with new notions, more clever monsters are roaming the land, devouring the very environment which sustained demoncratic, even plutocratic life, not to say lies. This is how dinosaurs disappeared: global change, and the death-blow given by better equipped, given the new circumstances, opportunistic predators.
Please stay tuned.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 