It all started in the year 3784 CE when the fisrt time machine was invented. People inevitably eneded up going back in time to see what the dinosaurs were like... as it turns out.. very tasty! Kinda like chicken, which further re-inforced the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds. The trade for dinosaur meat grew and grew. People went back in time specifically to traffic dinosaurs to the present day. Unfortunatly, the taste for dinosaurs was too much. They were overly harvested for their meat.. which inevitably ran out. Leading to the extinsion of all dionsaur species. Except one. The loch ness monster which remained uneaten until 4561 CE when the lake was evaporated by Sir Pizwit IIV who had gotten rich from selling reconstiuted llama substitute.

Never heard that on before.

The dinosaurs never existed. The Giant Spaghetti Monster uses His Noodly Appendage to fabricate fossils and carbon date records in a bid to test our faith.

Ramen.


Seriously, the meteor is by far the most likely theory, seeing as we have a crater that matches roughly the time when they all died. On the other hand, it is difficult to explain how some of the other creatures seemed to survive, most notably the ancestors to modern reptiles.


I'm not evil, I'm morally challenged

explain then how it now appears there where two meteors, some 300,000 years apart, or was it 30,000?

effs; there were many more than that. there have been several mass extinctions in prehistory, some of which were bigger than the one that did for the dinos (the Pre-Cambrian extinction is supposed to have wiped out 90% of all life)

There are also many remaining meteor *scars* that show we've been hit many times, satellite observation has made an increasing number quite evident - though the dino one is in the sea off Mexico.

btw it's not just meteors that cause mass extinctions! there are supervolcanoes; the Deccan plateau eruption is thought to have caused major extinction, and as a result of supervolcanoes there's prolonged darkness and cold like a nuclear winter, ultimately leading to *snowball* earth according to one clever hypothesis.

why don't you ask Rec, he knows loads about this sort of geological stuff.

don't forget the influence of rabbits on the life-cycle of the planet.

A slight problem with the extention issue, as in Puluxi(sp) Texas, they have found human foot prints along side dinasours in limestone.

Although there are no dinosaurs there are dragons.

amazing what you can do with a chisel, isn't it? c'mon, they're obviously fakes. wouldn't be the first time paleontogical fakes have been palmed off. Piltdown Man, Archaeopteryx, the Lying Stones of Marrakech, and so on ad infinitum for heaven's sake, Mrs Taw has a fossilised fairy skeleton on the mantlepiece, looks real enough - it isn't though.

even I can fake fossils, i did it with a dinosaur bone once when i was a kid (it was actually cast from a dog bone)

I can't work out how much of this thread is tongue in cheek - am I to believe that there are people here who do not believe that dinosaurs once existed?

We all know that dinosaurs once existed at some point. At least most of us do.

I get the feeling ff and Finalday may feel that dinosaurs co-existed with humans at one point and were wiped out in the Biblical flood. If that's the case it's not really fair to argue with it on a no religious discussion forum.

Taw's right about the cooling effect of super-volcanoes, after Krakatoa near Indonesia erupted explosively in 1883 (it wiped out 2/3rds of the island and was loud enough to be heard in Australia!), it spat so much ash and particles high into the atmosphere that it reflected a lot of the sun's rays and cooled global temperatures, causing bitterly cold winters for a few years, in fact record snowfalls were recorded around the world for four years afterwards. On the plus side all that dust in the air helped make some pretty intense sunsets.
The extinction level super-volcanoes actually tend to turn into calderas, they're so big that once they blow they don't build up much land so much as the ground around it collapses into the magma chamber! Krakatoa is considered to be a small example of a caldera explosion.

It'd be nice to hear what AELK has to say about it considering she studies (or studied) palaeontology.

It is, however, interesting that they seem to be finding older and older remains of Homo Sapiens in addition to the 'precursor' lines. Some older societies, too, if I remember correctly.But back to the time of the dinosaurs? I have my doubts.

There is physical proof that humans were here with the diasours. The problem with those that say there weren't, is they have no proof that there wern't people here. As in, according to some scientist, people were not here, therfore they truly have no proof how the dinasaurs died, only guessing. If I find a deer dead, I can have it studied, and see if a hunter brought it down, then have proof. The asteroid doesn't hold water, as one big enough to wipe out dinos, would also effect the other land animals as well.

@ Finalday-would you happen to have the references available at hand? I'd be very interested in taking a look at the availabe evidence.

btw-there is a good article on mass extinctions in the May 1991 edition of Analog, authored by Jeff Hecht. As he points out,"..Further evidence for an impact is the discovery at the boundary layer of unusual amino acids present in asteroids but not in terrestrial materials" There's also a good graph on the periodicity of mass extinctions in the article

Edited by - Fred the Dead on 12/13/2005 11:49:28 AM