:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 9.12.2008 ::
:: "Lucky break allowed dinosaurs to rule Earth" ::
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Thanks to a big stroke of luck 200 million years ago, dinosaurs beat out a fearsome group of creatures competing for the right to rule the Earth, scientists said on Thursday.
Dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, during the Triassic Period, and competed for 30 million years with a group of reptiles called crurotarsans, cousins of today's crocodiles that grew to huge sizes and looked a lot like dinosaurs.
Many scientists believed dinosaurs were simply superior to crurotarsans and fared better because the earliest dinosaurs walked on two legs, not four, and because they may have been warm-blooded.
But scientists led by Steve Brusatte of Columbia University and American Museum of Natural History in New York conducted an extensive review of fossils and found that the two groups were evolving at roughly the same pace and the crurotarsans actually had a larger range of body types, diets and lifestyles.
The dinosaurs won out, Brusatte concluded, because some type of planetary calamity 200 million years ago -- dramatic climate change or maybe a large meteorite impact -- nearly wiped out the crurotarsans while sparing the dinosaurs.
"The fundamental question is why were the dinosaurs able to become so dominant," Brusatte, whose study is in the journal Science, said in a telephone interview. "Evolution on a big scale oftentimes is a matter of luck."
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 2:32:00 PM [+] ::
...
