Mighty Dinosaurs Extinction Theories

Mighty Dinosaurs Extinction Theories

Shaunice Williams

July 19th 2015

Dinosaurs are magnificent, mysterious, mythical beasts—the kind of dragons people used to invent in stories before we ever knew they once were real. Dinosaurs are extinct of course, gone since the end of the Mesozoic 65 million years ago. The mystery behind the extinction of the mighty dinosaurs is vast. There are many extinction theories floating around that have no kind of evidence backing them up, except a select few. As you were growing up, and learning about dinosaurs you would always learn that they were wiped out because of the meteor that hit the earth. We learned about that theory because it is the one with the most evidence supporting it. However there are two other theories that have some supporting evidence. The volcanic eruption theory, is where the dinosaurs died by volcanic gases. Another theory is that Dark Matter killed them off, meaning a Super Nova. The theory that stands out, with the most evidence on its side is the meteor theory.

The meteor theory was first proposed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son geologist Walter Alvarez. The father- son duo discovered a link with a 110-mile wide impact crater near the Yucatan coast of Mexico. It’s now known as Chicxulub. The asteroid collided with the earth ejecting large quantities of dust and iridium into the atmosphere. The settling of this dust which was high in iridium resulted in a cretaceous-tertiary boundary or KT- boundary. The high-precision radiometric dating analysis of debris kicked up by the impact now suggest the Chicxulub collision happened no more than 33,000 years apart. The meteor was about 10 km in diameter and weighed nearly a trillion tons. Billions of tons of pulverized theoretically rocks were blown skyward by the Chicxulub impact for miles. As the larger pieces fell back, they heated and ignited firestorms on the ground across entire continents. Soot and dust circled the earth, darkening the sun for...