May 21, 2020
OK. So today I broke my rule (again) and commented in the New York Times. This time it was in response to an article about the problems of eating meat, written by Jonathan Foer. But, in my anger, I went farther – equating Covid-19 to the demise of the dinosaurs and claiming, without evidence (which is wrong if you’re not President), that a virus killed off the big guys too.
So here is my reasoning, such as it is, line by line:
It appears there was a major asteroid impact around the time the dinosaurs disappeared.
This in itself is circumstantial until proven otherwise. The asteroid didn’t hit each and every dinosaur. So a mechanism to relate the impact to their demise is required.
Because it happened so long ago, it seems to me that more may be learned from those it didn’t terminate than those it did.
Turtles made it through. Snakes made it through. Crocodiles made it through. Birds (who are dinsosaurs for crying out loud) made it through, largely unchanged. Sharks made it through, largely unchanged. Fish in general seem to have made it through, including one, the coelacanth, which seems to be in its original, prehistoric form. Mammals made it through. Fish don’t come up for air. The ancestors of whales – also mammals – dove into the sea to replace the air breathing dino-types that died off.
But, except for birds, dinosaurs didn’t make it through. The time it took for that to happen is hard to estimate and estimates therefore vary. At the upper end of estimates, the period may have been many times the length of modern human history.
Dinosaurs were very successful. They occupied every niche, on land and sea (counting air breathing dinosaur-like critters that also disappeared). But the thing, whatever it was, that got them got them all, in time, exept birds. Climate change isn’t enough to explain it. The dino’s saw plenty of that during their reign. And they adapted. Nuclear winter didn’t kill the crocs.
So, ask yourself, what can come through your house and kill the dog but not you? Kill you but not the cat? Hint: not an asteroid and not a change in the weather. Only microbes, be they viruses, bacteria, funguses, molds or any of the such-like, can assassinate with such surgical precision.
We know that the blood of crocs and turtles is antiseptic. This is because they often live in swampy, septic environments. Did this help? Do crocs get the flu? If so, how do they handle it? Dunno. But somebody knows.
Birds get the flu. But like us, it doesn’t always get them all. Is their response – raise their body temperature – like ours.? Dunno. We have a bird, but Goldie’s not talking and never seems to get as sick as the rest of us.
Birds also can fly. So they can form isolated populations better than most. That may have been of use. Feathers are also great insulation, useful in hot and cold niches. But that seems to have been a long-standing dino-thing well before the die-off. Crocs, turtles and snakes don’t have feathers. Mammals have fur and some fly, but not like the dinos did, and still do.
Anyway, the bird-mammal-flu merry-go-round would seem of some probative value and maybe more fruitful in figuring out what killed the dinosaurs that simply saying there was an asteroid hit around the time they died and then walking away from the question as if that settled it.
Last year, here in PA, a thing called EHD (for Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease) came through the farm and killed all the deer. I mean all. Some just dropped in their tracks by the stream or pond. The summer was made memorable by the smell of hundreds, maybe thousands, of pounds of rotting meat coming from the woods. Yesterday I read that a similar hemorrhagic (this word means something like “turns you inside out” and is incompatible with living much longer) disease was killing rabbits. Australians opined that they hate the buggas anyway, so good riddence. They have their reasons, but still. Our dear little Bun?
The word of the day is “zoonotic.” Look it up. Mother Nature is angry and this country has elected a science-denying fool and his moronic clan to lead it.
MOE
M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity