Close shave from an undetected asteroid

AustinHinton said:
The thing about the Dinosaurs though (don't worry this is a common misperception) was that the meteor didn't wipe them out, they are still among us, as birds. The end of the Cretaceous was NOT the heyday of the Dinosaurs, in fact the overall number of species was much lower than it was during the early Cretaceous. In Western North America, there were tons of Triceraptops, Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, but this is pitiful in comparison to Western North America a few million years prior. The general consensus is that Dinosaurs as a whole were on decline (in terms of the number of species) even before the meteor struck. An ecosystem with fewer species is far more vulnerable to disaster than one with lots of species.

Directly after the K-T boundary, the largest animals were crocodilians, which, by virtue of their physiology (they can go months between meals) faired far better than their dinosaurian relatives. Fun fact about crocodilians, the earliest crocodilians were quadrapedial runners, modern crocodilians evolved lower metabolisms as an adaptation to being amphibious ambush predators.

...And I just got way off topic, sorry. :confused: I just get excited talking about this kind of stuff.
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You may off topic anytime! lol I found it very interesting!
 
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Fact remains the larger dinosaurs such as T-Rex and others are no longer with us.....Was that a direct result of an incoming meteor? I don't know. Sure we have ancestors of the dinosaurs still around snakes, crocodiles etc....My point being is that humans will survive just like the distant cousins we have of the dinosaurs today.
 
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And just to add the Chebelinsky meteor came in from the Sun thats the reason no one ever saw it coming. These asteroid detection devices from NASA are great but if it comes in from the Sun no one will see it until its to late.
 
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Debi said:
You may off topic anytime! lol I found it very interesting!
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Thank you! Its kinda a special interest to me. :)

Insane Prophet said:
Fact remains the larger dinosaurs such as T-Rex and others are no longer with us.....Was that a direct result of an incoming meteor? I don't know. Sure we have ancestors of the dinosaurs still around snakes, crocodiles etc....My point being is that humans will survive just like the distant cousins we have of the dinosaurs today.
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Uh, snakes aren't ancestors of Dinosaurs, neither are crocodiles. Crocodilians and Dinosaurs came from the same basic stock, but neither is ancestral to the other. Just like your cousin is not your ancestor. Snakes belong to a completely different evolutionary branch than Dinosaurs. In fact, snakes did not appear until the later ages of the Cretaceous, they are realitivly new comers.

There's no saying Humans as a whole will survive a major environmental disaster. We are genetically* and morphologically too similar to survive a widespread catastrophe. More likely candidates for survival are rats, mice and bats. Bats are the second largest order of mammals, after rodents.

*Humans, dispite varying widly in physical apperence, are genetically very "same-y". All the Wildebeest in Kenya have more genetic variety than we do. Evidence exists that Humans went through a genetic "bottleneck" a few hundred thousand years ago.
 
Insane Prophet said:
And just to add the Chebelinsky meteor came in from the Sun thats the reason no one ever saw it coming. These asteroid detection devices from NASA are great but if it comes in from the Sun no one will see it until its to late.
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That's the problem...the blind spots. We've had a lot of those in the past few years, actually.
 
Good ideas here. I hope we don't get hit by a big meteor!
 
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