Intriguing hypothesis on extinction of dinosaurs: Laying eggs doomed them.

Vastet
atheistBloggerSuperfan
Vastet's picture
Posts: 13234
Joined: 2006-12-25
User is offlineOffline
Intriguing hypothesis on extinction of dinosaurs: Laying eggs doomed them.

I usually try to post a snippet that sums up the article, but in this case I think the whole thing should be read, so I'll post a teaser instead.

Quote:
Weighing in at four tons, the mother animal was 2,500 times heavier than its newly hatched dinosaur baby. By way of comparison, a mother elephant, which is just as heavy, only weighs 22 times as much as its new-born calf. In other words, neonates are already big in large mammal species. The staggering difference in size between newly hatched dinosaurs and their parents was down to the fact that there are limits to the size eggs can become

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120417221713.htm


Sage_Override
atheistBlogger
Posts: 565
Joined: 2008-10-14
User is offlineOffline
Quote:In the case of the

Quote:
In the case of the dinosaurs, this would mean that a single species occupied the majority of the ecological niches while mammals occupied these through numerous species of different sizes."

 

So, if I'm reading this article right, due to dinosaurs being born with limited size options at birth, they couldn't occupy particular "niches" that mammals could and because of this, the diversity of sizes was less favored and they eventually died out since there was fierce competition among each species variant.  Eventually, the smaller dinosaur species took out their own and the larger species did the same.  I guess in a way that makes sense, but I'm sure this was probably just the beginning of the end of dinosaurs and not the overall main cause for the mass extinction.  Great article, though.


Vastet
atheistBloggerSuperfan
Vastet's picture
Posts: 13234
Joined: 2006-12-25
User is offlineOffline
Remember, this is in

Remember, this is in combination with the impact event, not a stand-alone extinction cause.

Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.