evolution and the extinction of dinos

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Originally posted by Peter:
As I understand it, the 'nuclear winter' caused the extinction of
the larger animals, while smaller ones survived.

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As a cause of extinction at that time it is by no means universally
accepted though. I'm sure a little web-searching would throw up
a multitude of ideas and opinions on the subject.

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Personally I've never found the asteroid collision theory that
compelling so I'd like to hear more thought on this subject too.

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JM: Me neither as the sole cause. We do know (a) an asteroid hit the earth at about the time the dinosaurs cease to show up in the fossil record. Most likely, the asteroid was not a positive life event for those dinosaurs. We also know that the Deccan traps erupted some 3 x 10^6 km^3 of basalt at about the same time the dinosaurs stop appearing in the fossil record. That volcanism was not a positive life event for extant creatures. We also know that Dinosaurs were on the decline prior to those events (likely due to diseases resulting from the introduction of Asian stock with North American stock (see Bakker's book Raptor Red for an interesting fictional account of these events). Taken together, none of these were particularly good for the dinosaurs and the previous two were not good for other organisms. Tommorrow, we are having a departmental seminar on the subject so I'll let you know if anything new comes from that.CheersJoe Meert

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Originally posted by LudvanB:
The problem with your position is that you place the Ice Age right after the mythological flood,4500 years ago and thats not the analysis that trained,experienced geologists get from the evidence they gathered. I posted a web site the other day where geologists speak of for great ice ages being represented in the geological records,punctuated by short periods of warmer and cooler climates(the current climate being warmer,obviously)...those ice ages last for millions of years at a time,as the geological records indicate and the last time that the Ice retreated was nearly 12 000 years ago.

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Actually geologist have noted quite a bit more than 4 ice ages. You are talking about the more recent ones. There are also Permo-Carboniferous glacials, Ordovician glacials and several episodes in the Precambrian. This is a very difficult thing for creationists to explain since glaciation span the entire geologic column. Creationists pretend they don't know about the others because they have no explanation.CheersJoe Meert