itt: pictures of dinosaurs gazing haplessly at the arriving meteor

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/36047705_10155884648862261_442946926493564928_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=f941383a0ff352eeda935332876e66a2&oe=5BA226B7

Day 5 of Wakarusa

https://i.imgur.com/HVA3ZuI.jpg

from sanpaku's big quote:

This was stressful enough to kill all individual nonmarine macroscopic organisms

i know it goes on to say "except" etc, but don't we know that, while it was indeed a Very Big Die-Off, it was nevertheless also Quite a Big Survive-Off. Plenty of non-bird dinosaurs (and other nonmarine macroscopic organisms) survived the meteor. Were all the survivors swimming or down a hole, or are proto-feathers a good shield against radiation?

The long incubation periods needed for bigger egg laying dinosaurs and the ability for small mammals to rapidly breed like rats didn't suit the former and paved the way for the latter, during the post Chicxulub fun era. Well this is something I remember Elizabeth Kolbert saying in the 6th Extinction. I'd imagine if you were in a zone where super-heated matter was raining down on you from orbit - big or small wouldn't make much difference to how toast you are!

what puzzles me really is the conflict between claim 1 = "asteroid as total wipeout" vs claim 2 = "asteroid tipping the balance betwen two ecological orders"

dino-world didn't vanish overnight! fossils suggest there were still largish land dinosaurs (eg hadrosaurs) around half a million years later -- which is a bit more than a blink even in geological time. claim 2 seems much the more plausible, whatever the mechanism -- but the impact is so often described as if it were entirely unsurvivable bar very good individual fortune (but claim 2 requires good *species* fortune, surely?)

I've read these 2 contradictory accounts in the past: 1 the Deccan Trap eruptions were already causing much S02 related global warming problems for these big bastards! And 2 The Deccan traps eruptions might have actually been caused by the Chicxulub impact.

the first rule of chicxulub is don't resolve the contradictory chicxulub theories

free the chicxulub 7

https://thumb9.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/996350/178928552/stock-vector-seven-cute-colorful-cartoon-dinosaurs-178928552.jpg

A couple years ago, I saw a YouTube lecture by the lead author of this paper where he talks about looking at Google Earth satellite imagery of eroded Deccan traps deposits. Topologically below the putative Chicxulub horizon, the traps are crossed by numerous huge fault lines, while above, the lava layercake has been largely unmolested.

So, all surface life spent a few hours under an oven broiler, and almost simultaneously, experienced a magnitude 9+ earthquake which liquified sediments and caused numerous surface fractures. Then, survivors faced several years of nuclear winter from all the ash injected by global forest fires into the stratosphere. Then, for a few hundred thousand years thereafter, the peak of Deccan traps volcanism caused a global hothouse and oceanic anoxic/euxinic event, with sulfur dioxide damaging the ozone layer. It was a rough time.

it's enough to make one proud of complex terrestrial life forms for managing to survive and breed under terrible conditions.

so does this lead author have a theory why any complex species *did* survive the rough time?

they just wanted it more iirc

what if chicxulub, but too much

the idea of extinction-level events being specific incidents that alter the planet such that a species’ extinction is guaranteed over time, not wiped out instantly or in a short period, is going to give me something to ponder

you could have multiple extinction-level events that occur, with each hastening the clock or not really having a noticeable effect because a larger one already occurred

there have probably already been extinction-level events for humans, it’s just on such a large timescale we can’t necessarily perceive it. the best possible conditions for the rise of a species occur once, negative conditions occur constantly

the only true indicator that you will be extinct some day is existing at all

in other news, I saw the new dinosaur movie. not really that good.

all jurassic movies are bad not good, they are like james bond with very short arms

there’s a volcano, though. that’s probably the best part, and due to all of the dinos being right next to it, extinction event

mh was talking about book club i think

b-but the first rule of book club is…

"so then i tell the guy, look, I don't care if you already replaced the compressor, the fact is – ... whoa, hold up, what's going on?"

https://i.imgur.com/16V5in2.jpg

The Toba eruption 75k years ago ya may have reduced the population of *Homo sapiens* to 3000 individuals. This sort of *near* extinction event is also a major driver of natural selection. Neurologist William Calvin wrote a handful of books in the 1990s on how the ice ages brought us from *Homo habilis* to Lascaux.

have just started reading the Brannen book this aft. He reckons on the geologic timescale humans are about as equally influential as penis worms. So we'd have to do a lot more existing to catch up with these dinosaurs!

calzino: you might enjoy The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, by Jan Zalasiewicz as a companion piece.

I'd accumulated some research on past extinction episodes, so as I listened to Brannen's audiobook on its day of release, there were few surprises.

^By which I mean that Brennan is presenting the current consensus. Most mass extinctions are associated with volcanism and a global warming episode.

Well, my tweeting that Brennan quote has lead to M John Harrison reading and enjoying the book, so expect some wild geological SF in a few years.

Wat is penis worm pls

"Go look in the mirror", etc

apparently they taste like clams and eaten raw in some places.

xps to Sanpaku

I have that book on my kindle, just never got round to reading it.

Oh wait, is it a candiru, the little fella with a brief but memorable cameo in Naked Lunch?

the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater Amazon Basin, will dart up your prick or your asshole or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is not known since no one has stepped forward to observe the candiru's life-cycle in situ...

Nope - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priapulida

Thx

apparently they taste like clams and eaten raw in some places.

― calzino, Sunday, July 1, 2018 10:37 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

worm I said

I've got to admit that eating some poor creature that looks like a prosthetic cock, just stone cold raw off a plate seems like a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch themed restaurant!

...temperature estimates for the End-Permian mass extinction and its aftermath strain belief. In the Karoo Desert, as rivers stopped winding, insects stopped buzzing, and mass death swept over the land, the temperature might have jumped as much as 16 degrees Celsius. On Pangea, 140-degree-Fahrenheit heat waves wouldn't have been unusual. In the tropics, ocean temperatures skyrocketed from 25 degrees Celsius-similar to today's oceans- to perhaps upwards of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). This is the temperature of a hot tub, or as End-Permian expert Paul Wignall puts it, that of "very hot soup." Multi-cellular life simply can't exist in this sort of globe-spanning Jacuzzi. The complex proteins of life denature-that is, they cook. The language of academic papers is typically measured and sober, but even the peer-reviewed science literature describes the early Triassic period that followed this worst mass extinction ever as a "post-apocalyptic greenhouse."

https://scontent-ort2-1.cdninstagram.com/vp/b75d6fc77e1d18b28caa461da8c7e23c/5BC1FCA9/t51.2885-15/s480x480/e35/33376572_387621541725441_8535239759738437632_n.jpg

Pictures of Chris Pratt gazing haplessly at dinosaurs:
http://digitalspyuk.cdnds.net/16/41/320x320/square-1476288011-jurassic-world-chris-pratt.jpg
http://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1200x1200/public/2018/04/screen_shot_2018-04-18_at_2.16.37_pm.png?itok=tGorBM6l×tamp=1524075466
https://www.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_960x540/HT/p2/2018/06/08/Pictures/_674af80c-6aea-11e8-af35-5e950c6035ab.PNG

what if it wasn't the asteroid:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/

"Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom (…) She* argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists."

* = Gerta Keller of Princeton, who "says she’s been called a 'bitch' and 'the most dangerous woman in the world,' who 'should be stoned and burned at the stake.'" lol rational academic debate eh

I think she might be right about the Deccan Traps playing a bigger role in their extinction than the Chicxulub jobbie. All the other major extinction were during hothouse or cooling earth periods, why should this one have been any different?*

*not that I know shit, like!

I heard something the other about reverse engineering ancient DNA traces with supercomputers, and yeah they are birds!"

*extinction events edit

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2018/05/24/15/dinosaur-asteroid.jpg?w968

new and correct haplessness begins here:
https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/160705-dino-630x487.jpg

Dinasaurs going off their tits on mcat, while the world is turned into a post apocalyptic hothouse!

gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom

poll, obv

https://assets1.bigthink.com/system/idea_thumbnails/57293/size_1024/dinosaur_volcano.jpg?1418393900

Paleo Weltschmerz, currently playing for Schalke 04's second team, hoping to break through to the first team in the coming season, has represented Germany at Under 19 level.

^ This was totally the correct thread for that post.

some high quality images in this last update