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Mick Harper and the Dinosaurs (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Way back in 2006, on our old, secret, Web site, hosted in a research facility station on a forgotten island off the coast of Costa Rica, Mick made this suggestive statement...

Mick Harper wrote:
I don't know where you got the idea that [my recent work] supports your Man And Dinosaur Could've [lived together] Theory. It is certainly true that other theories of mine (that you still don't know about) might support such a hypothesis....


Much has happened since 2006. However, no sign yet of these strange new theories.

My question; will Mick satisfy our curiosity? Is there another Treasure Hunt yet to be had?

Will he tell us of these ideas supportive of the notion that Dinosaurs and Man may not be separated by millions of years?
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Duncan71


In: Calgary
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I have tracked down a potential source of evidence:

http://blogs.babble.com/famecrawler/files/2010/09/the-flintstones.jpg
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Duncan71


In: Calgary
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All kidding aside I'm also interested in hearing Mick's ideas. I've long suspected that there is something amiss with regards to the K-T boundary extinctions (the convenient division between the 'Age of Dinosaurs' and the 'Age of Mammals').

Paleontologists are overly reliant on fossil evidence for figuring out evolutionary timelines. Fossil formation is actually quite rare for some life forms. Some species are only known from single fossil examples. This can lead to a wide assortment of assumptions about geologic age, relative abundance and the range of environments in which a species lived.

Take for example the lemurs of Madagascar. Their fossils on Madagascar are essentially missing up until 26,000 years ago yet this hardly provides evidence that they did not exist for millions of years before then. There is little fossil evidence for most primates for much of their evolutionary history. It seems likely they lived in similar environments in the past as they do today and these environments don't typically allow for the creation of fossils.

The essential issue is that fossils simply suggest existence at a particular point in time (which is potentially poorly dated) and not when a species first developed or when it finally went extinct. A disappearance of fossils does not necessarily suggest extinction. The real question is to ask 'why' the fossils disappear.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Duncan71 wrote:
The real question is to ask 'why' the fossils disappear.


Err, is it because only big (dino-sized) bones survive that long?

Or is it because all the big species shrunk to survive (something)?
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Duncan71


In: Calgary
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I don't know for certain myself. This is why I was wondering if Mick had some insights.

However, I have considered that an alternative to complete extinction and that is that they still existed in some environments where fossilization was a near impossibility. Areas where a quick burial by fluvial, lacustrine, marine or volcanic sediments were extremely unlikely and scavengers and microorganisms were plentiful.

This is not to say that a clade of thousands of species didn't undergo some significant event that affected their numbers and distribution or there certainly would be fossils to be had somewhere in the more recent past in environments where fossilization is possible.

The present paradigm necessitates a catastrophe that was big enough to wipe out an extremely large proportion of the world's species but for some convenient reason not everything. I like to call it the 'goldilocks' syndrome (not too big, not too small but just right).

For a clade as diverse as 'dinosauria' with such a wide variety of ecological niches, body plans and sizes, it is difficult to believe that complete extinction could have happened in one fell swoop. It's like believing that something could take out every species of mammal without exception.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I can't remember what my original theory was but it presumably involves my pointing out the obvious (but which is never recognised by orthodoxy) that all fossils are destroyed by glaciation. Obviously, if human beings are polar-adapted primates (as I argue anyway) then it follows that their fossils would be destroyed constantly and across the board. This would apply for the first, say, fifty million years of their evolution.

It would put a neat twist on things if it turned out that the Great Apes were but warm-adapted humans, making us the missing link.
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Roger Stone


In: conclusive
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Duncan71 wrote:
The present paradigm necessitates a catastrophe that was big enough to wipe out an extremely large proportion of the world's species but for some convenient reason not everything. I like to call it the 'goldilocks' syndrome (not too big, not too small but just right).


...because if it HAD wiped out everything, there would be no-one alive to post on this intriguing website, so we wouldn't be bothering our pretty heads with it?
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Duncan71 wrote:
I like to call it the 'goldilocks' syndrome (not too big, not too small but just right).


Other people like to call it that as well.
Paul Davies wrote a very good book on the subject.
The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?

Duncan71 wrote:
For a clade as diverse as 'dinosauria' with such a wide variety of ecological niches, body plans and sizes, it is difficult to believe that complete extinction could have happened in one fell swoop. It's like believing that something could take out every species of mammal without exception.


Except that, if the fossil record is to be believed, the last big round of extinctions took out nearly all the "too bigs", and it was only the "too small" critters that adapted and survived. Or the too bigs all shrunk?
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Duncan71


In: Calgary
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According to Wikipedia:

'The "Goldilocks principle" states that something must fall within certain margins, as opposed to reaching extremes. When the effects of the principle are observed, it is known as the Goldilocks effect'

Apparently a whole range of individuals have used it in cognitive science, astrobiology, medicine, economics and communication. I never claimed to be original.


Except that, if the fossil record is to be believed, the last big round of extinctions took out nearly all the "too bigs", and it was only the "too small" critters that adapted and survived. Or the too bigs all shrunk?


Yes, 'megafaunal' extinctions do seem plausible. Just look at the large mammals that have disappeared in the last few tens of thousands of years. Large scale environmental changes do tend to be very hard on large species. However, why not the 'too small' dinos? (With exception of avians). Why the entire clade of 'dinosauria'? Why all marine reptiles? Why all pterosaurs (many of which were not all that big)?

Fossils of nearly five-hundred pound mammals have been found within three million years of the K/T boundary. The current theory claims that they had shrew size ancestors. Fine ... but now we have to believe an evolutionary process that increases overall body size by 1,000 times in three million years.

Whale evolution also takes a very strange course. It took approximately ten million years for a dog-sized terrestrial mammal to evolve into fully aquatic set of species and another ten for them to take on the forms that we recognize as whales today and very little change for the last thirty-five million. The problem is they needed to develop methods of avoiding hypothermia, be able to drink salt water, a tail that moved up and down instead of side to side, lose a pelvis, develop sonar, a circulatory system that allows them to dive to incredible depths and a whole host of morphological features unique to aquatic life forms. Some of the most significant changes to undergo any life form in only twenty million years followed by twice as much time in comparatively near stasis.

Or we can accept that changes were more gradual, extinction events not as extensive, that the fossil record is very poor and glaciations of which we are not currently aware have destroyed much of the fossil record.
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aurelius



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Is it true that, outside of Creationist fantasies, no dinosaur fossil has ever been found after the KT event?
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aurelius



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Why some clades survived has long fascinated me. Looking for common behaviours, lifestyles etc. I would start by suggesting:

Very deep sea creatures
Creatures which could eat then go without food for days/weeks
Creatures which live in tunnels/underground
Insects, which we are told were only badly affected during the previous and worst known extinction event at the end of the Permian period.

Hard to explain how the soft bodied terrestrial amphibians survived..
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Duncan71 wrote:
Why the entire clade of 'dinosauria'? Why all marine reptiles? Why all pterosaurs (many of which were not all that big)?


Perhaps because most of 'dinosauria' were marine reptiles, not land reptiles?

e.g. Swindon in Wiltshire. In historical time, once the site of the biggest industrial complex in the whole of Europe (the Great Western Railway works). In geological time, a few million years earlier, it was a warm shallow sea with plesiosaurs and giant shells.





http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/entertainment/days_out/walk_through_time/08.shtml

Now it's just a question of what caused sudden and catastrophic uplifting of the land, or sudden receding of the sea.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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By "catastrophic" I mean catastrophic for any marine mammals and fishy fings that suddenly didn't have a leg to stand on. Or couldn't survive out-of-water.
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aurelius



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Sorry Boreades, but the marine reptiles ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pliosaurs etc. were not Dinosauria, but marine reptiles. This distinction is even more significant now Dinosaurs are considered semi warm-blooded, which as far as we know the others aren't.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Perhaps because most of 'dinosauria' were marine semi warm-blooded mammals, not land semi warm-blooded mammals?
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