I first heard the brainless 'theory' back in 1988 when Seismosaurus hallorum was first discovered. It didn't make a lot of sense back then, either.
     The most obvious problem is that, while the deinosaurs were larger than they'd ever really been before the Maastrichtian, they were also getting smaller. The dromaeosaurs, by obvious example, had shrunk from the Aptian Deinonychus antirrhopus down to the Velociraptor mongoliensis.
     Of course, I'm pretty interested in hearing more about this 800-tonne animal from the article. Especially if it was the male of the species, since we already know that the females were larger. A female with a mass of a kilotonne would be neat, wouldn't it?
     As for archaeologists: I've been seeing that a lot on the 'net. Mostly from creationists [which, as of yesterday, are calling themselves creationalists, which may or may not be Imbecilese for creationologist] inventing strawmen and anonymous 'scientists' publishing equally anonymous 'theories' that deinosaurs were vegetarian creations who lived more recently than Megalania prisca and Carcharocles megalodon. Granting that archaeos and palaeos are roughly synonymous, I'm not really surprised to see an Engrish article confuse the two.
     Whether 'the accepted explanation that a meteor crashed into the Earth sending debris floating up in to the atmosphere and blocking the Sun's rays is correct' is another matter. While we know that an asteroid with the surface area of Manhattan smashed into the Yucatan at the end of the Maastrchtian, I wouldn't say that it's an accepted explanation per se. The planet gets hit by these things every thirty to thirty-five million years; and they tend to ?cause extinctions. I still doubt that this asteroid alone killed off the deinosaurs as we know them. If we want to call the asteroid the smoking gun, then we're still looking for the second gunman. Bakker's idea of a plague still has a lot of merit.
     With dinosaurs [sic] basically cold-blooded creatures, they weren't able to control whether they were hot or cold. This also concerns me. It's unusual to encounter anyone with any biological background at all who will still claim that the deinosaurs were ectotherms. In the simplest terms, the deinosaurs evolved out of alligators and into birds--neither of which are ectotherms. The cross-sections on the bones suggest that they were endotherms; the genetic testing on S.hallorum shows it to have been closer to a whale than any other known living animal. These guys were a little tougher than the day geckos we have today.
     Personally, I don't even think of the deinosaurs as being truly extinct. Coelophysis bauri is extinct, and has been since the Norian epoch; Tyrannosaurus rex is extinct, and has been since the Maastrichtian; Geococcyx californianus and Alligator mississippiensis are alive and well, and will probably outlive H.s.sapiens by natural process.
     Maybe the archaeologists of the future will set the record straight: the deinosaurs never became to large to mate, but the homosapiens became to dumb to survive.
     --Gremlin

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