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>Finally, even though its been said many times in many places by many people
>far better qualified to address this issue than I, let me point out that
>dinosaurs didn't go extinct. Birds are dinosaurs. It's precisely this sort
>of lapse that gets us into trouble when we try to analyse associations
>between extraterrestrial factors and evolution/mass extinctions.
>
>
>Norm MacLeod
The point seems pointless. Ecological disasters don't kill you because of
where you group in a cladogram, they kill you because of what you eat,
where you live, how big you are, when you mate, etc. If a group of closely
related, large, terrestrial tetrapods suddenly disappear from the face of
the earth it's an event that is real and needs explanation irrespective of
the fact that some little relatives of theirs flutter off into other
ecological niches where they find refuge. Birds are different from
dinosaurs, but no matter how different they were, their place in the
cladogram would be the same, and so the cladograms don't contain the clue
to their survival.
Stefan
Stefan Bengtson _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/
Department of Palaeozoology _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/_/
Swedish Museum of Natural History _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Box 50007 _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/
S-104 05 Stockholm _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Sweden _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
tel. +46-8 666 42 20
+46-18 54 99 06 (home)
fax +46-8 666 41 84
e-mail Stefan.Bengtson@nrm.se
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