Gawdzilla wrote:Animavore wrote:Gawdzilla wrote:Animavore wrote:The book I have just describes the fossil record and gives no insight into why they survived. This book is more about the tree of life and shows the intermediaries between ancient and modern types. Quite detailed it is too but it doesn't stray out of palaeontology. It stays on topic throughout.
Sorry.
Feck's article gives an opinion on the dinos, but I'm still looking to see if the "rule" applies across the board for the K-T event. If relative brain size is the key for the dinos would it apply to other types of animals? If not, does it really apply to dinos?
It could be size and warm bloodedness either. I did once read speculation that mammals because they were small and could sustain themselves on grubs and insects and such through the darkness following the aftermath and cold.
The dinosaurs that became birds already had feathers which could have insulated them and I know some of them were quite small like chickens. They may even have had warm blood already at this stage. Fossils can never tell us things like that.
Ok the part about the avian dinosaurs is totally me speculating but if they can do it so can I.
Alligators and turtles survived. Coelocanth (sp?) survived. Warm-blood would have helped, but it's not the only type to survive. (Just rambling here, thinking out loud.)
And crocodiles and sharks, likely among many in the hydrological environment.
It doesn't occur to me that either brain size
or warm-bloodedness were absolutely crucial to surviving the KT event. Neither alligators nor crocs nor turtles or sharks have large brains, but they are warm blooded. The mammals that survived were small and rodent-like in stature, no real big brained types there, but warm bloodedness is there. We're not sure if the beakless dinos that survived had become warm blooded or not by the time KT event struck.
I reckon the trick is to think about the nature of the global environment post KT event and consider what attributes would have contributed to the survival of species in that environment. Waterways and seas and oceans probably didn't change a good deal from before the event to after it, aside from perhaps some cooling. For terrestrial species it seems that small size and warm blood were key, for which we can be thankful because we descended from those survivors!
Anyway, it's an interesting question.
Have you got one of those international satellite thingys?