Talk-Polywell.org

Watching TV re. the K-T boundary and the end of the dinosaurs.

The TV program gave several theories, including the Yucatan killer meteor theory. But one guy on the program made a big deal that dinosaurs ended before the K-T boundary because of the fact that no dinosaur bones have ever been found at the K-T boundary. I got to wondering what the probability is that we would have found one bone from the KT boundary, if that is when the die off happened.

Given the length of the Mesozoic age of dinosaurs, the number that must have lived and died, the number that died in the final die off, and the number of bones we have found. With no data, I estimated everything using 125 million years as the length of the Mesozoic age. I come up with 50/50 chance that we would have found one bone within 200,000 years of the K-T boundary.

What do you think?

I think that your math is a bit spurious, as is most on this subject. But, if we assume it's correct, it's not something to make any conclusions about. Your paper would be rejected if you did not have at least a P.05 certainty, statistically.

It's a hypothesis at this point, hardly tested.

Discovery Channel likes to have the radical theory guys on, because they're entertaining. But their hypotheses are often based on things like absent data, or missing theories. If nobody can explain X, then the explanation must be Y. Like the guys who claim that the Sphinx is 12,000 years old from erosion at it's base. Forget that, by the same reasoning we can dismiss the idea of a 12,000 year old Sphinx becaust there's no other evidence at all of a culture of that age sophisticated enough to have built it... nobody has come up with a better explanation for the erosion, so it MUST be 12,000 years old.

Don't get me wrong, I watch it all the time. I'm just pretty skeptical. That doesn't stop it from being fun. I hope they can, in fact, prove some of these theories at some point. It's always good to turn the scientific community on it's head... shakes things up.

Mike