Cretaceous Internal Combustion

So... I'm mind my own business... fumbling around the web when I discover a completely reasonable justification for throwing paleontologists and climatologists in a cage for a no-rules death match.

Bear with me here...

In this article we learn about this gloriously vast snake fossil. Which really has nothing to do with my point... except that there is this one fabulous nugget slipped in. That's how it works really... if you pay attention... the inter disciplinary contradictions just jump right out at you.

Buried in the article we find this:

"Why are today's snakes smaller? The report concludes that temperatures at the equator were higher (86-93.2 Fahrenheit) than today (82.4 Fahrenheit) and facilitated the large body sizes of air-breathing animals whose body temperatures are dependent on ambient environmental temperatures. "

Now we are reliably told that a 1 degree increase in the global temperature would utterly destroy the world as we know it.

And yet... it was 11 degrees warmer... 5 times the doom.... just 65 million years ago... when life as we know it supposedly developed... or so the fairytale goes. But how can this be says I? How can it have been so hot? It couldn't possibly have been that hot... I mean unless we're positing that early mammals made use of the internal combustion engine.

Which we're not.

...

Are we?