• Question: how do you think the dinosaurs went extinct

    Asked by hevaarawr to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      There are several theories, but the one I think is more likely says that a gigantic asteroid hit the earth, throwing millions of tons of dust up into the atmosphere making it cold and causing plants to die through lack of light. This would make it hard for dinosaurs to find food. There is a food chain, so even if some dinosaurs didn’t eat plants, they ate other animals that did eat plants, and those would have found it hard to survive too so there would have been less of them around. Since dinosaurs are big, they need lots of food, and since they are reptiles they rely on sunlight to get their metabolisms working. No food + No sunlight = bad news for a Dino! Except for Barney. He somehow survived.

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I think they had an inflight meal on “US Airways”

    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I think most people agree that it was a huge asteroid that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I asked for help with this one. My colleague Pam Trigg has a son who is a student geologist and he says:

      The extinction of the dinosaurs wasn’t total. Many of the smaller ones survived the cretaceous-tertiary extinction event and went on to thrive. These then evolved into the species we know as birds and reptiles.

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