Dinosaur extinction insights available near a New Jersey strip mall?
Maybe. From Yahoo News:
Paleontologists are excavating a fossil site that might unlock a treasure trove of insights into the disappearance of the dinosaurs — and it’s just a stone’s throw from a New Jersey strip mall.
The Mantua Township quarry could be the most important prehistoric dig site in years if scientists are correct in their hypothesis that it contains animals that died when a meteorite struck the Earth 65 million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs.
“In the end, if our work doesn’t find anything to disprove that, then this would be the only site in the world where we have fossils of organisms that actually died during that extinction event,” paleontologist Paul Ullmann told Yahoo News.
The fossils include dreadnaughtus, which weighed more than seven T. Rex.
Any help understanding why the entire dinosaur lineage died out, ending the Cretaceous period and the Mesozoic era, would be welcome.
It’s not the fact that so many life forms or even so many species or families died out, but both orders of dinosaurs, once domnant, disappeared over a short period of time.
What if all orders of reptiles died out in a short period of time, leaving only mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish and a few other chordates in the phylum? Would we not see that as something remarkable in and of itself?
See also: Extinction: Was the Red Queen right? Does failure to evolve lead to extinction?
Extinction claim: Humans, not climate change, at fault for most extinctions …
Megafauna extinction not caused by human beings, after all
So extinction might be reversible? Flowing wooly mammoth blood found in carcass
It really sounds as though we don’t know nearly enough about extinction, which is the grim third alternative to evolution and stasis.
Hat tip: Timothy Kershner