gofaster: Dinosaurs killed by virulent disease?
And here we are displaying their bones out in the open! Who's going to protect the children!
As I've said - if that was a desease and it still exists - not necessarily in a 65-million year old bones - it may be some common bug harmless to us like flu or even a beneficial symbiont - like e-coli that protects us from colon cancer, etc.
Remember - 95% of the native americans (19 out of 20) died within a few years of the contact with Europeans, reducing ~100 million population to about $5 mil practically overnight. It took them about 200 years to get their numbers to about 14 mil and they were still plaqued by deadly epidemics. That kind of mortality rate is very close to extinction and we talking about a deseases that already were prevalent in humans - meaning its virulence was reduced by natural selection to sustainable levels and to which at least some fraction of humans had resistance in the first place.
Even now whenever researchers make contact with an undiscovered tribe in Amazon Basin, over half of them die within months from the common flu.
A bug jumping from another species or a newly evolved variety to which no one has resistance but which can be spread by other species and so is not self-eliminating could certainly wreak havoc with any related set of species.
miko
