Comments on: Study: Massive Lava Flows Allowed Dinosaurs to Conquer the Planet

By: YouRang

YouRang — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:11:32 +0000

re the crurotarsans. Have they determined at what point the dinosaurs became warm-blooded? That’s an advantage in climate change times when not all creatures can quickly find a new niche. Admittedly , I believe our ancestors were also already warm-blooded and it didn’t help them.

By: amphiox

amphiox — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:50:46 +0000

The Ice Ball theorists say that the land masses gathering make an Ice Ball Earth.

I think the location of the supercontinent also matters. In the previous snowball earth the supercontinent straddled the south pole, while Pangaea straddled the equator and did not cover either pole.

Also the age of the sun and earth (as the sun is gradually getting hotter as part of its normal main sequence evolution) matters as well. The next supercontinent episode will probably have a much lower likelihood of inducing a snowball earth, I think.

By: katesisco

katesisco — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:17:51 +0000

Pangea was ‘pulled apart’ sounds like expansionism to me. Remember that the previous large continental mass was also ‘pulled apart’ and then somehow coalesced to form Pangea over 300 million years or so. And each of these expansion onsets reduced O2, perhaps even laid O3 on the Earth making it impossible for life. Extinction event. The PreCambrian Explosion was the Ice Ball Earth of perhaps billions of years giving way to multicellular life.

The Ice Ball theorists say that the land masses gathering make an Ice Ball Earth. Only Pangea was ‘pulled apart’ as soon as it formed so had no chance to form Ice Ball Earth. Lucky us.