So I was just watching a show on History Channel about the dinosaur's extinction (it's Armageddon week!), and they were bringing up some interesting new theories that I didn't know about. Apparently there's no direct evidence that the large asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous caused the extinction of most of life on earth. There's no fossils of dinosaurs around that time, the most recent ones are from many years earlier. Scientists are theorizing that there was a global pandemic of disease and insects that collectively wiped out most dinosaur life. Dino's had gotten too large and were able to travel most of Pangea to other parts where there were diseases and insects they hadn't adapted to resist. Same principle is still around today, and is why any minor climate change is such a big deal (besides that animals have nowhere else to escape to other than their current habitats because of us). Zoo's have to completely separate African and Indian elephants because they've evolved such different bacteria ecosystems inside of them, and they can get each other sick and die. And elephants are a species that only left Africa and migrated to Europe to Asia a few thousand years ago. Basically, due to changing climate patterns of the time dinosaurs were forced to migrate all across Pangea and encountered lots of new biodiversity that eventually killed them. All well before the Cretaceous-ending asteroid struck that actually brought about the new conditions for new life to develop. Anyway, the show is called First Apocalypse and if you search for it on TPB, you can download it. First Apocalypse
Definitely plausible. On a side note, Armageddon week? Week?! The History Channel has turned into The "We're Fucked" Channel. Everytime I turn it on, they're talking about asteroids or global plagues, or terrorism threats, or Mayan 2012, or Nostramus predicting the apocalypse. The shit is getting ridiculous.
Sounds kind of convincing, but i think that it's more than one solid thing that killed them off. What exactly, I have no idea
I think they're making fun of the whole "We're Fucked" phenomena though. At least in the Mayan2012 and Nostradamus specials I've seen, they were showing the holes in those theories' "logic." But then again they do tons of programming on that make-believe megalomaniac born sometime around the year zero, so who knows what they believe. ...A challenger enters the brawl! That's the point of developing new theories to fit new evidence that gets uncovered. Right now, the disease/insect theory is the most supported by what we know about fossils we've found and climate change at the time.