Last Dinosaur?

[Zardnaar]

Well the common theory is asteroid hit earth, Dinosaurs died out RIP.

Any survivors starved to death.

However various species did survive and birds are dinosaurs. Horseshoe craps are also a living dinosaur.

However I have read that some survived in New Zealand for another million years.

https://www.newscientist.com/lastwo...ow-long-did-it-take-the-dinosaurs-to-die-out/

Conditions here are not ideal for fossils. Since I was a kid though they're found partial fossils of various dinosaurs. 5 species may have survived short term at least.

Ecologically mammals never rose to prominence here either. The surviving dinosaurs evolved into birds. Here the birds were the apex predators.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa

Maori legend also has stories of giant birds preying on children.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast's_eagle

And finally we also have a living fossil.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatara

Also ferns were a prominent part of the ecological niche here.

Land lost in time?

Anyway so if dinosaurs did survive anywhere (even briefly) NZ seems like the best candidate along with Antarctica. Antarctica froze over so hard to find fossils.

So what do you guys think?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Birds are dinosaurs. They are all around us all the time.

 

[Zardnaar]

Birds are dinosaurs. They are all around us all the time.

I know but wondering about non Avians.

 

[Birdjaguar]

They all died out "soon" after the strike. No one knows exactly what "soon" means. 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? 5,000 years, 500,000 years?

 

[Zardnaar]

They all died out "soon" after the strike. No one knows exactly what "soon" means. 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? 5,000 years, 500,000 years?

I think the consensus is a few months. Any survivors would have starved to death.

Just wondering if anyone's more up to date.

There's been no fossils found above the KT boundary.

But there are some counter arguements that there would have been pockets where stuff survived.

 

[Hygro]

I thought the consensus was thousands of years ?

 

[Birdjaguar]

I thought the consensus was thousands of years ?

Probably a shorter rather than longer time. Our dating systems are that fine grained yet. I would guess that extinction varied from place to place while most died out pretty quickly.

 

[Zardnaar]

I thought the consensus was thousands of years ?

I'm not 100% sure. If they survived that long theoretically you would find some fossils above the KT boundary.

 

[Zardnaar]

Probably a shorter rather than longer time. Our dating systems are that fine grained yet. I would guess that extinction varied from place to place while most died out pretty quickly.

This is what I'm thinking.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm not 100% sure. If they survived that long theoretically you would find some fossils above the KT boundary.

Almost all dead dinos don't fossilize.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I thought the consensus was thousands of years ?

Remember how dust-ridden the atmosphere gets after just one major volcanic explosion, or how bad the air quality gets during major forest fires?

Then think how it would be when an asteroid hits the planet and blocks out the sun for long enough that the dinosaurs' food supply either burned or froze (for the plant-eaters) or starved (for the carnivores). Then, when the top predatory dinosaurs' food supply ran out, they starved in turn. It would have taken far less than a millennium. I'm guessing - admittedly - that cannibalism would have been happening among the carnivorous species, but in time that wouldn't have been enough. Conditions wouldn't have been right for any eggs to survive the cold, so my assumption is that it would have taken maybe a year or two at most for all of the dinosaurs to die out. When your food supply dies and your eggs don't hatch or the hatchlings starve, your species is not going to make it.

 

[Ajidica]

 

[Zardnaar]

Remember how dust-ridden the atmosphere gets after just one major volcanic explosion, or how bad the air quality gets during major forest fires?

Then think how it would be when an asteroid hits the planet and blocks out the sun for long enough that the dinosaurs' food supply either burned or froze (for the plant-eaters) or starved (for the carnivores). Then, when the top predatory dinosaurs' food supply ran out, they starved in turn. It would have taken far less than a millennium. I'm guessing - admittedly - that cannibalism would have been happening among the carnivorous species, but in time that wouldn't have been enough. Conditions wouldn't have been right for any eggs to survive the cold, so my assumption is that it would have taken maybe a year or two at most for all of the dinosaurs to die out. When your food supply dies and your eggs don't hatch or the hatchlings starve, your species is not going to make it.

I did provide a link to 5 species perhaps surviving another million years. I'm wondering if theres any more.

Further away from the impact site more survivors it seems.

From what I've read life bounced back quick in evolutionary terms.

Other species apart from birds also survived.
I think some plants here also predate the KT boundary. Ecology here was unique up to 13th century AD.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I did provide a link to 5 species perhaps surviving another million years. I'm wondering if theres any more.

Which link was that?

 

[abradley]

Not trying to bring religion into it, but interesting, like 'Why are there adult T"Rex remains/bones but no young T'Rex remains?'

 

[Zardnaar]

Not trying to bring religion into it, but interesting, like 'Why are there adult T"Rex remains/bones but no young T'Rex remains?'

Some remains of different species may actually be sane species different age.

Younger bones may also be softer.

There's not that many T-Rex remains found either they're kinda rare.

 

[Samson]

Horseshoe craps are also a living dinosaur.

Horseshoe crabs are arthropods, and much more ancient than dinosaurs.

 

[Zardnaar]

Horseshoe crabs are arthropods, and much more ancient than dinosaurs.

The term basically means something that was alive during the time of the dinosaurs and superficially is unchanged.

 

[Zardnaar]

Which link was that?

First one.

 

[Hrothbern]

With everey big extinction the funghi, feasting on decaying plant material, become the rulers of the world... though only for a couple of years according to wiki... then the plants come back

Terrestrial plants[edit]
There is overwhelming evidence of global disruption of plant communities at the K–Pg boundary.[24][64][65] Extinctions are seen both in studies of fossil pollen, and fossil leaves.[24] In North America, the data suggests massive devastation and mass extinction of plants at the K–Pg boundary sections, although there were substantial megafloral changes before the boundary.[24][66] In North America, approximately 57% of plant species became extinct. In high southern hemisphere latitudes, such as New Zealand and Antarctica, the mass die-off of flora caused no significant turnover in species, but dramatic and short-term changes in the relative abundance of plant groups.[62][67] In some regions, the Paleocene recovery of plants began with recolonizations by fern species, represented as a fern spike in the geologic record; this same pattern of fern recolonization was observed after the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.[68]

Due to the wholesale destruction of plants at the K–Pg boundary, there was a proliferation of saprotrophic organisms, such as fungi, that do not require photosynthesis and use nutrients from decaying vegetation. The dominance of fungal species lasted only a few years while the atmosphere cleared and plenty of organic matter to feed on was present. Once the atmosphere cleared, photosynthetic organisms, initially ferns and other ground-level plants, returned.[69] Just two species of fern appear to have dominated the landscape for centuries after the event.[70]

Polyploidy appears to have enhanced the ability of flowering plants to survive the extinction, probably because the additional copies of the genome such plants possessed, allowed them to more readily adapt to the rapidly changing environmental conditions that followed the impact.[71]

Fungi[edit]
While it appears that many fungi were wiped out at the KT boundary, it's noteworthy that evidence has been found of a "world of fungus" dominating for a few years after the event. Microfossils from that period indicate a great increase in fungal spores, long before the resumption of plentiful fern spores in the recovery after the impact.[72] Monoporisporites and hypha are almost exclusive microfossils for a short span during and after the iridium boundary. These saprophytes would not need sunlight, during the period where the atmosphere may have been clogged with dust and sulfur aerosols.

This "fungal world" appears to happen during many such extinction events, including the Permian-Triassic boundary, the largest known in earth's history, losing 90% of all species.[73]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_extinction_event#Terrestrial_plants