Posted on 07/23/2008 4:06:14 PM PDT by Soliton
DINOSAURS were running out of evolutionary steam during their last 50 million years on Earth, scientists have learned. The reptiles were left behind in the "Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution", 100 million years ago, that saw the massive proliferation of vegetation and many animals.
While flowering plants, lizards, snakes, birds and mammals all evolved swiftly, dinosaurs plodded behind. A short time later, they were extinct.
Researchers made the discovery after using computer programs to produce a "super-tree" of dinosaur lineages. The results showed the most likely pattern of evolution for 440 of the 600 known species of dinosaur.
The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveal dinosaurs had a burst of diversification in the first 50 million years of their reign. Then their rate of evolution slowed down and scientists believe they failed to take advantage of the new plant and animal food sources.
LOL
Me Too!!!!
Dinosaurs ran out of stamina Ping!
I have no problem taking care of new food sources.
Conversely, the vulnerability of the population can lead to greater evolutionary diversity.
LOL! Same here!
Thanks for the ping!
"And even if there'd been iridium at the scene, O.J. was innocent!"
Of course we don't know all the details...isn't it great to have science, where we can construct hypotheses to test, or make observations, synthesize theories...?
I guess we're going to have to free a lot of the murderers then. Since in a lot of cases noone directly witnesses a murder except the victim and the murderer, we can never be absolutely certain how the person died.
And I guess that trying to draw plausible conclusion from an imperfect data set is completely uncalled for. We need to wait until we have ALL the data before we do anything.
“A Real Live Case of a Darwin Fish?”
This McNuggets news bit asks a question similar to asking why so few 7 ft. and 4 ft. tall men are in the Marines.
Excellent straw man but still.....
In the same way climate change computer programs loaded with tons of information may produce plausible but wholly wrong scenarios. Same thing with trying to model dinosaur behavior long after the fact. But they’re plausible until one looks at reality. Like weather and climate, dinosaurs don’t exist in computers. gigo
“Of course we don’t know all the details...isn’t it great to have science, where we can construct hypotheses to test, or make observations, synthesize theories...?”
Useful all but we don’t have many of the details or even the most important ones, so let’s be careful not to confuse the theory, the hypothetical, etc. with demonstrable fact.
“iridium...O.J...”? Not even close to clever!
“Dinosaurs existed in the real world, not in computer programs and in the real world we don’t know why they died out.”
We don’t know how they died out? Having implicit faith in the veracity of the Scriptures, my money is on the Flood of Noah as the turning point for many species. The Scriptures give us the ages of some of the pre-flood men. For instance, Methuselah, who was Noah’s grandfather lived a long time. Gen 5:27 And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died. Noah himself lived 900+ years; 300+ after leaving the Ark.
But human lifespans dropped off precipitously after the Flood. For instance, the Patriarch Abraham only lived 175 years, compared with Noah and others from the pre-flood era’s 800 to 900 plus years. Gen 25:7 And these are the days of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, a hundred threescore and fifteen years.
The climate on planet earth was completely different when they came OFF the Ark from how it was when they went aboard the Ark. I believe it was the climatic change that caused their demise.
Sorry you found it too difficult to understand entirely.
And I’m sorry you couldn’t understand what I wrote entirely.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.