Today’s ‘you what?’ claim is that insect attacks finished off the dinosaurs. A husband and wife team makes the outlandish claim in a book published this month by Oregon State University.
George Poinar, who holds a courtesy professorship (a step below being a full professor) at Oregon State University, thinks that the appearance of biting insects and the spread of disease could have brought down some of the mightiest animals ever to have roamed the earth. “Other geologic and catastrophic events certainly played a role. But by themselves, such events do not explain a process that in reality took a very, very long time, perhaps millions of years. Insects and diseases do provide that explanation,” he says (press release).
Poinar has previously reporting finding the leishmaniasis pathogen in the gut of one insect from the late Cretaceous and organisms that cause malaria in another. Blood-sucking insects could have caused epidemics that wore down dinosaur populations. The book also points out that a change in plant life from traditional dinosaur meals such as ferns and cycads to flowering plants involved co-evolution with new pollinating insects.
There might be some merit to Poinar’s ideas. But the pick-up by a number of news sources is surprisingly uncritical for fairly extravagant claims not tested by peer review.
Here are the problems as I see them…
If dinosaurs couldn’t adapt to the changing conditions and the rise of insect/disease vectors why could other animals? Could biting insects even get through thick dinosaur skin? Why does no one mention peer-reviewed criticism of work including Poinar’s* that any journalist could have picked up with a google search?
Incidentally, my boss tells me that Brian Aldiss once wrote a short story in which a time traveling big-game hunter enjoys the thrill of shooting a diplodicus, only to be killed by the lobster-sized lice that rush off the dead body looking for a new host.