"Lost World" of Dinosaurs Survived Mass Extinction?

"Lost World" of Dinosaurs Survived Mass Extinction?
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
May 1, 2009

An isolated group of dinosaurs somehow survived the catastrophic event that wiped out most of their kind some 65.5 million years ago, a new study suggests.

Dinosaurs of this "lost world," in a remote region of the U.S. West, may have outlived their doomed relatives by as much as half a million years, according to James Fassett, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Fassett, who has argued for years that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction, based his latest work on fossils from the San Juan Basin in what is now Colorado and New Mexico.

There, the bones of hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, anklyosaurs, and several other species were found together in a sandstone formation that dates to the Paleocene epoch—the time period after the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event, which is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs.

As with his past research, Fassett's latest find is likely to continue sparking controversy among paleontologists.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090501-dinosaur-lost-world.html

No news here

Inquiring minds want to know.

by Jack Horner who proposes using chicken embryoes and tweaking their DNA until you have devo-evoed a living dinosaur.

Interesting, but in the end I was creeped out.

No matter how many genes you tweek, and how close the chicken-dinosaur looks like a dinosaur, you're never going to know if you have devolved one properly, and it just doesn't seem right to create and destroy the thousands of hybrid chickens while you try to figure it out.

He addresses the animal rights argument in his book with the good retort that it's not like we take good care of chickens today, but it still left me feeling it wasn't worth the moral cost.

Of course since birdsa are just avian dinosaurs, they never actually did go extinct anyway.