Yahoo News: Asteroid Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs: New Evidence

[Predicto]

Well that just lowers the chances of finding intelligent life out there. First theirs the whole planet having to be in the Goldilocks zone with all the right conditions to spring life. Now you're telling me said planet has to be hit by a huge asteroid at just the right point in evolutionary time to wipe out the big ass lizards that evolve first to make way for the smaller mamals to evolve? Either that or we find a planet full of hyper evolved intelligent lizards, whom, if they find us first just might make a snack out of us.

[DaGoonie55]

Amazing read. Love this stuff.

[Predicto]

I believe the current idea is that there were bird like dinosaurs (flying with feathers) and even possibly some birds before the extinction event happened.

In addition, during times of stress many organisms can increase their mutation rate which would change the evolutionary rate (essentially, what I'm doing now isn't working so I might as well try something else).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14617178

Or the mutation rate stays the same but there is a much larger chance that the mutated ones will be the ones who get all the food and get to reproduce because the conditions for living have changed so much that the ordinary members of the species are poorly equipped to survive.

[pjfootballer]

Dinosaurs were not reptiles, although there are facial similarities. The closest thing left of the dinosaur tree is birds.

I wish I knew more in the subject of all the periods and epochs of earth, but I was figuring maybe a prehistoric crocodile or snake may have been around the time of the dinosaurs, but maybe they were after.

[Predicto]

I wish I knew more in the subject of all the periods and epochs of earth, but I was figuring maybe a prehistoric crocodile or snake may have been around the time of the dinosaurs, but maybe they were after.

Crocodiles were around then, and are more closely related to dinosaurs than snakes and lizards are.

[DCSaints_fan]

See here's the thing. If the dinosaurs became birds, or evolved into birds in 33,000 years, that doesn't jive with currently biological/evolutionary/genetic law. No way it could have happened in 33K years without God. Win one for the intelligent designists.

Dinosaurs didn't become birds, birds *are* dinosaurs (according to some, classification can be a fuzzy concept in evolutionary biology).

[grhqofb5]

Ahh... so the extinction event did not cause the evolutionary event. It was more like, those Dinosaurs who had already evolved into birds survived, the ones that didn't died. No Dinosaurs said "Oh ****" I'd better become a birds or I'm screwed." They just became extinct. Because an event on this scale would not provide adequate time for evolution to occur before extinction. It hits, the dust flies into the air, and its a brave new world. No transition.

[Bang]

the dinosaurs actually tried to build an ark to survive.
Sadly, Tyrannosaur's arms were used to measure cubits, and the ship turned out WAY too small.

~Bang

[twa]

just another theory , might be like the one on the Clovis people extinction
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Aster...e-266045.shtml
Asteroid Impact Did Not Wipe Out the Clovis People

they will sort it all out eventually

[Predicto]

Ahh... so the extinction event did not cause the evolutionary event. It was more like, those Dinosaurs who had already evolved into birds survived, the ones that didn't died. No Dinosaurs said "Oh ****" I'd better become a birds or I'm screwed." They just became extinct. Because an event on this scale would not provide adequate time for evolution to occur before extinction. It hits, the dust flies into the air, and its a brave new world. No transition.

Yep. That's the theory as I understand it. It is subject to revision or even complete abandonment based on new evidence, of course.

[Jumbo]

the dinosaurs actually tried to build an ark to survive.
Sadly, Tyrannosaur's arms were used to measure cubits, and the ship turned out WAY too small.

~Bang

[Elessar78]

Proposing an alternative theory....