Re: Why did small dinos become extinct?

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> 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.