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Re: Why did small dinos become extinct?
I'm rather disappointed at the lack of response to my original question -
is there a decent explanation for the extinction of small non-flying
predatory dinosaurs (including those which are regarded by some as
secondarily flightless birds)? The "standard theory" of the K-T
extinction is that a catastrophe killed off vegetation, the herbivores
starved and so the carnivores starved. But one would expect that small
non-flying predatory dinosaurs could have survived by preying on lizards,
invertebrates, mammals, etc. which survived the K-T extinction.
This requires that large numbers of individuals of mammals etc. survived,
enough to sustain viable populations of predators -- and that was apparently
not the case (as expected from the impact hypothesis). Indeed, several
clades of mammals and lizards died out altogether.