I’m old enough to remember how little mouse-like mammals only began to appear after the dinosaurs had been helpfully killed off by an asteroid.
“We think it’s one of the most unexpected fossil discoveries from the Triassic of Europe,” said paleontologist Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki of Uppsala University in Sweden.
Lisowicia, the largest-known non-dinosaur land animal alive at its time, was about 15 feet (4.5 meters) long, 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) tall and weighed 9 tons. The only other giants around at the time were early members of the dinosaur group called sauropods that had four legs, long necks and long tails.
Oh.
There could have been lots of mammals. The chances of a mammal on land dying 250 million years ago, then becoming fossilized, then being dug up by a human are so astonishingly remote that it’s probable that everything we think we know based on the fossil record is wrong. Land very rarely become fossils. They usually get eaten by scavengers and disappear into the landscape.
Technically, mammals emerged before the dinosaurs. The entire age of the dinosaurs is littered with mammalian fossils, most often in the form of teeth.
Speaking of settled science: Paradegoers Brave Coldest Thanksgiving in New York Since 1901
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/nyregion/cold-weather-thanksgiving-parade.html
and,
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is coldest parade on record..
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/11/22/macys-thanksgiving-parade-record-low-temperatures/2085308002/
Cold weather is not climate … however … every warm day is PROOF of global warming. Every CA wildfire (ignited by PG&E) is PROOF of global warming … idustrized-manmade global warming.
A scientifical debate going-on about the asteroid; Gerta Keller (who’s sorta’ the James Delingpole of anthropology) asserts that the K-T mass extinction of the dinosaurs was actually caused by a huge, and very long volcanic eruption that filled the atmosphere with various acids over 30,000 years.
As an example of what’s possible here, in 1783 Laki volcano in Iceland spewed-out 3 cubic miles of lava, flooded the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide and hydrofluoric acid and pretty-well starved Europe out; it’s credited with causing the French Revolution. 66 million years ago, the Deccan Traps spewed-out 720,000 cubic miles of lava – a field 600 miles long, that reached all the way to the Indian Ocean.
https://www.livescience.com/25324-volcanoes-killed-dinosaurs.html
It’s good reading.
There is no doubt an asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago and put an end to a large number of species. The question is how much damage was done during the preceding 30,000 years due to extreme volcanism.
The answer is complicated. Research in China shows species decline well before the asteroid during a period of time when the earth warmed rapidly (probably due to the Deccan Traps). Gerta Keller has noticed this. But research at the asteroid impact site in Mexico shows species doing well right up to the impact. Even more puzzling is the fact that many species (not dinosaurs) did well near the impact site even after the impact.
My theory is that the scientists who make these claims get high marks for their observations and low marks for their conclusions. Also, scientists are well known for holding onto their own theories while ignoring the observations of their colleagues. This is why science progresses one death at a time.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/what-killed-dinosaurs-volcanoes-asteroid-earth-science/
We’ve always known that mammals evolved at the same time as dinosaurs. During the Permian era, before the the great extinction the dominant land animals were the synapsid protomammals, the ancestors of mammals. The famous Dimetrodon, the reptilian appearing creature with the sail on its back was not a dinosaur or a reptile..it was a synapsid protomammal. After the permian extinction the conditions favoured the rise of the previously obscure archosaurs, leading to the dinosaurs who outcompeted the surviving synapsids for the top niches. The synapsids then evolved into mammals.
What we didn’t know was that 250 million years ago there were mice scurrying around weighing in at 9 tons. Makes you want to stop working on that time machine.
To think of all the money wasted on useless research into questions whose answers humans will never know amd will never need to.
Meanwhile research into tools that could actually help mankind improve itself are neglected. Chemical cures for liberalism come to mind.
Yes.
Besides, who knew that Al Gore was wandering around Poland 200 million years ago.
The money put into “useless research” is minor compared to our entire economic output. If you want to find useless wastes of resources that would be better put to other uses, there are far better hunting grounds than science.
On thing I learned during my time as a grad student was that much of academic research in science and engineering is nothing more than make-work projects designed to keep people busy and justify their paycheques. If it wasn’t for that, those academics would actually have to go out and work for a living and many are quite incapable of doing that, partly because many of them have an open disdain for earning one’s keep.
A lot of that research is quite useless because it’s all a money-harvesting scam. William Proxmire, with his Golden Fleece Awards, had that right. The whole scheme works like this: come up with an idea and make it sound good to whoever’s going to foot the bill. Give the impression that one is productive by publishing a lot of papers, making sure to spread the results over as many publications as possible to give the impression of actually having accomplished something. When the funding needs to be renewed, repeat the process and keep living high on the hog for the foreseeable future. Producing a large number of papers also increases one’s chances of being granted tenure and, thereby, a ticket to the golden hog trough that’s known as academe. What’s not to like about that system?
My own Ph. D. supervisor proudly admitted to me one day that he didn’t care what he worked on, so long as someone else paid for it. I’ve long believed that academics should pay for part of their research out of their own pockets. That way, they have a vested interest in what they’re investigating and have a stake in its success or failure. That would definitely cut down the amount of useless research.
In addition, corporations, which used to have their own R & D staff, farmed that work out to universities, enabling them to rook the taxpayer twice. First, universities, for the most part, receive government funding and that comes out of tax revenue. Second, those same corporations often get tax breaks for “out-sourcing” their research work to academe.
The fact that it all revolves around money is one reason why there has been an increasing number of cases of academic fraud as well as papers being retracted for reasons others than legitimate human error.
I once pointed out in a history lecture the semi-circle shore on the east side of Hudson’s Bay and the island exactly where it should be and made from the ‘splat’ came from a ginormous asteroid.
now THAT would be something to see.
regarding Senator Proxmire, I did not agree with all his targets, but absolutely on the right track. If he were still around putting pins in the spending balloons, would we still have that 500 billion dollar amusement ride in the sky aka ISS? ‘experiment this experiment that’. uhuh.
yo NASA, a suggestion: how’s about in 1980 you do a feasibility study to put an orbiting radio telescope in space at a convenient location. no gravity means it can be 5 kms diameter, construction consisting of carefully . . . . oh, right, you folks are a tad lax on the measurement thing (anybody remember the ‘Mr Magoo’ quality control cartoons about the Hubble?).
jeezuz murphy, think of it. NO atmospheric blurring at all. looking right to the extreme edge of visible existence with resolution unimaginable any other way. constructed in such a way that it could be enlarged as funds and curiosity coexist.
instead we get regular ‘space jock’ trips and tourism of some sort.
If he were still around putting pins in the spending balloons, would we still have that 500 billion dollar amusement ride in the sky aka ISS?
The only good thing that came out of the ISS (originally named Freedom, as it started when Reagan was President) was that it gave people experience in constructing and maintaining large orbital structures. Most of what’s investigated on board could easily examined on the ground. It’s little more than a government boondoggle like the Space Launch System is.
you folks are a tad lax on the measurement thing (anybody remember the ‘Mr Magoo’ quality control cartoons about the Hubble?)
And then there was the measurement unit mix-up which resulted in the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter nearly 20 years ago.