[Utilizer]

So global extinction events were more important to determining how our world came about than one might have supposed...

[Utilizer]

Thought this one might interest you, mate. :)

[BigEdLB]

Birds are the dinosaurs that didn’t get zapped by the low inside slider God put in the Yucatan, at the aforementioned 66 million year mark.

[freedumb2003]

>>So global extinction events were more important to determining how our world came about than one might have supposed... <<

Well, yeah.

All those caveman fires caused it to happen and women and minorities were hardest hit!

[knarf]

whacko birds

[BlueDragon]

So global extinction events were more important to determining how our world came about than one might have supposed...

Aha. So it could not have been simply a matter of slowly accumulated changes resulting from random mutation transcription errors, the unfit sorted out by natural selection.

Good thing those dinosaurs didn't develop shielding against Giant rocks from Outer Space, or we humans could have ended up being giant chicken feed.

Steven J. Gould, paging Steven Gould, Tokyo and

London Calling

(something about punctuation and equilibrium)

[Iscool]

Although the new study answers many questions, it poses many more, Chiappe says. Among them: Why did a large class of now-extinct birds called Enantiornithines (which were superficially similar to modern birds) die out? That’s especially mysterious because Enantiornithines were exceptionally abundant (they apparently outnumbered the ancestors of modern birds before the asteroid struck) and had presumably played the same ecological roles as the ancestors of modern birds, which survived the mass extinctions.

And the answer to that question is: uh, let's move along here...What's the next question...

[Moltke]

The asteroid impact catapulted the dinosaurs into the air so they had to learn to fly - quickly?