Dinosaur Killers

by Popoff, Alexander

  The nickel-containing asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would have been about 10 kilometers in diameter. Spread over the surface of the globe, this would amount to 3 kilograms per square meter, corresponding to a layer a few millimeters thick. This fallout would contain 130 to 1300 parts per million of nickel. The normal nickel concentration in soils is 15 parts per million; 40 parts per million is toxic.

  There are a number of ways for an animal to be exposed to nickel: eating nickel-contaminated food, drinking water containing nickel, through inhalation, and through the skin.

  Nickel from a vaporised asteroid poisoned the plants the dinosaurs fed on. The soot and debris injected into the atmosphere by a bolide contained a lot of nickel, which is soluble in water and very poisonous to plants and animals on the land and in the waters of the oceans, the seas, and the rivers.

  The mass of the vegetation was greatly reduced because the nickel in the plants prohibits photosynthesis.

  The symptoms of nickel poisoning are as follows: headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, irritability, etc.

  As nickel poisoning worsens, pneumonia-like symptoms develop as a result of the nickel settling inside the lungs. At this point, getting to a doctor as soon as possible is crucial for survival. There is no evidence that dinosaurs had any health system or even quacks with doctor degrees. And they died off.

  71. Super-hot Sun.

  The Solar System, orbiting around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, sometimes passes through unusually thick clouds of galactic dust. The great amounts of dust falling into the Sun causes it to burn brighter. The increased amount of Solar radiation elevated temperatures, causing global warming and skin cancer. Large animals like the dinosaurs were more vulnerable to the exposure to increased solar radiation.

  72. War between Satan and God.

  When God created the world, this was the time of the dinosaurs. There was a battle between God’s loyal angels and Lucifer and his rebellious angels, later called demons. In the description of Satanone could easily recognize a type of a dinosaur.The dinosaur proponents in the heavens lost the war.

  73. Glaciation.

  There were five major mass extinctions and numerous smaller ones, which repeatedly destroyed large parts of the species on our planet. A theory suggest that the real culprit is the Milanković cycle, which causes the climate to become too hot or too cold.

  Milutin Milanković mathematically theorized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth’s orbit determine climatic patterns on our planet.

  The variations in these three cycles change the solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. These times of increased or decreased solar radiation directly influence the Earth’s climate system. On some occasions, as a result of variations in these three cycles, the climate gets extreme and large parts of the surface of the planet very fast, geologically speaking, become covered with ice packs. The Cretaceous animals were used to the steady hothouse climate, and even a short period of glaciation proved fatal to most of the species, especially the large ones.

  74. Dinosaurs were only toddler toys of the evolving spirit.

  Michael Corey, author and Christian philosopher, was most well known as an advocate of deistic evolution. In his book Evolution and the Problem of Natural Evil he writes, “Now we are in a position to understand why an omnipotent Deity would have opted to create the universe in a gradual, evolutionary manner, instead of instantaneously by divine fiat. He presumably did so in order to facilitate the human growth process as much as possible; but in order to do this He seems to have been compelled to implement the same evolutionary processes in the natural world that appear to be an essential part of the Human Definition.”

  Creation and extinction of species are significant only in the view of human development. Does humankind really matterto God? An environment with endless births and deaths of species and individuals is only a playground for the evolving spirit. Humankind is one of the containers for the eternal divine spirit (whatever it is). Innumerable alien civilizations throughout the Universe also hold the developing divine spirit.

  Dinosaurs were only toddler toys of the evolving spirit.

  75. No sex.

  Dinosaurs developed a sophisticated civilization. When intelligent species and societies become sophisticated, they begin to lose interest in sex and other reproduction practices. Only primitives reproduce in large quantities. And guess what happened? They died off.

  76. Too high-tech.

  Dinosaurs developed a very sophisticated civilization. They did care very much about Nature and everything was biodegradable, including the servant robots, factories, vehicles, etc. Because of a software bug the robots stopped serving their dinomasters, who were very sophisticated and absolutely not used to work, and they just died out of hunger and thirst. The biodegradable machinery just biodegraded and now we find only bones and no technological artifacts.

  77. Interracial war.

  The first advanced dinosaurian race as an act of ultimate civilization killed the rest of the dinosauria off. What happened to this sophisticated dinosaurian society we don’t know. Maybe they left the Earth or died off, too. What is left of them are only bones. Technological artifacts can’t survive 66 million years.

  78. The Universe is anthropic.

  The universe is inherently anthropic, human friendly, and all nonanthropic species on a verge of developing a civilization are eliminated periodically to free the way to anthropic-type intelligent beings.

  79. Abducted by aliens.

  Most of the dinosaurs were abducted by aliens for some still unknown reason (labor force, entertainment, exotic servants, reproduction, body space parts, biological research and experiments, etc.) The rest died of stress. Is this the future of human civilization?

  80. Overheating.

  Animals with huge bodies have problems with removing of the body heat during hot periods. Even a temporary overheating can kill them. At the end of Cretaceous the temperatures increased because of some catastrophic event or natural short period of climate change, and all large animals died off.

  81. Epidemic Diseases.

  Dr. Robert T. Bakker suggested in his book The Dinosaur Heresies that most probably dinosaurs were deleted by epidemic diseases. The extinction period began with lowering of the sea level at the end of the Cretaceous. Previously, the oceans of the Cretaceous covered about 90 percent of the land surface, forming vast shallow seas. As they drained off, land bridges were created between formerly isolated continents and animals migrated extensively. Each animal population carried its own unique parasites and diseases, and when they mixed they exchanged their parasites and diseases, too, but most of them still didn’t have proper protection against the new viruses, parasitic worms, bacteria, etc. Smaller animals survived because they could not make such long migrations. Most of the marine species died off because the shallow seas dried up.

  Dr. Robert T. Bakker said, “It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything. I do point to disease. When big animals are spreading and mixing extinctions occur. You can see this with elephants. One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife.” This interview originally appeared in 1999 in the magazine Dinosaur World.

  82. They now live under disguise.

  Most of the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct. They just mutated and now scientists wrongly consider them nondinosauria.

  83. Bone malformation.

  High temperatures at the end of the Cretaceous massively produced skeletal abnormalities. Hyperthermia during pregnancy can produce fetal malformations. Malformations are usually complex and get progressively worse with time. The crippled dinosuria could not feed and reproduce normally. They lost the competition with the mammals and went extinct.

  84. Asphyxiation of dinosaur embryos.

  Excessively
high levels of carbon dioxide at the end of Cretaceous in the atmosphere led to asphyxiation of dinosaur embryos in the eggs.

  During normal respiration eggs must exhale carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1978, Oelofsen suggested that large dinosaurian eggs were suffering because of their surface-to-volume ratio and higher embryonic requirements inhibited the diffusion of carbon dioxide from the egg, and dinosaur embryos massively died off.

  85. Stupidity.

  Dinosaurs easily got confusion and mental disorders because of the minuscule size of dinosaur’s brains in relation to their bodies. Even small external disturbances like change of the diet because of new plants, ionizing radiation, mutations, etc., made them even more stupid than they normally were. One can’t expect a huge ancient cow with a minuscule brain compared to its huge body to be intelligent. The brightest among them were perhaps as bright as modern pigs, which are considered something like thinking tanks on four legs. But 99 percent of the dinosaurs were really stupid.

  Researchers think that carnivores are more intelligent than herbivores because it is far more difficult to catch a running prey. They had to track, chase, catch, and kill a prey that was fighting for its life. In most cases, carnivores are smaller than their prey. They should be able to organize an attack in a pack to bring down a large prey.

  Plant food doesn’t really tend to try to escape from the herbivores using some cunning technique or fight back—you just walk around quietly and munch grass and leaves as much as possible. No intelligence is needed.

  At the end of the Cretaceous, the environment changed greatly very fast—new plant species, new insects, new diseases, shallow waters disappeared, climate changed, seasons appeared, etc., and the dinosaurs were not bright enough to cope with the changes and the competition of the mammals. And they had to walk off the world stage; only the flying ones remained because in order to fly their brains developed a bit more.

  86. Entropy.

  Entropy, fatigue, and energy loss increased. The result was less order, which caused eradication of larger organized life forms.

  Entropy is the energy which is not available for work. For instance, the thermal energy always moves from a region of high temperature to a region of lower temperature and loses energy.

  The entropy of a system is proportional to the order of the system, which means as the entropy increases the order of the system decreases.

  Since the larger organisms are more ordered than the smaller organisms, the increase in entropy affects the larger species more. Because the dinosaurs were huge and lead a more organized life, they were affected by the decrease of order and ultimately could not survive.

  87. No breathing stimulus.

  Although animals need oxygen in their bodies, a lot of what they inhale is made up of various gases, including carbon dioxide. The primary stimulus for breathing is carbon dioxide in the blood. The rise of carbon dioxide in the blood drives the need to breathe. However, there are other factors that do contribute to this, like a decrease in the level of oxygen.

  According to Wieland, 1942, at the end of Cretaceous due to extensive growth of plants, the oxygen levels increased, the carbon dioxide levels decreased. Low levels of carbon dioxide removed the “breathing stimulus” of warm-blooded dinosaurs and they stopped to breath.

  88. Cataract blindness.

  A cataract is a clouding of the lens inside the eye, which leads to a decrease in vision.

  The dinosaurs spent too much time in the sun, overexposing themselves to the harsh ultraviolet light, and got cataracts, and because they couldn’t see very well, they couldn’t find enough food or just fell over cliffs and died out.

  In 1982, ophthalmologist L.R. Croft suggested in his book Last Dinosaurs: New Look at the Extinction of the Dinosaurs that bad eyesight finished off the dinosaurs. Since exposure to heat and strong light can make cataracts form very quickly, dinosaurs developed weird horns or crests to shield their eyes from the relentless Mesozoic sun, but these attempts to shade dinosaur eyes failed and the creatures became blind.

  When dinosaurs were going blind in the day, the nocturnal animals, including mammals, survived and took over dinosaurs.

  89. Dinosaurs ate themselves into extinction.

  Paleontologists Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major and Edward Drinker Cope speculated that mammals raided dinosaur nests so frequently that the dinosaurs could not reproduce.

  In 1925, the Yale University paleontologist George Wieland published a paper titled “Dinosaur Extinction,” in which he stated that the small Cretaceous mammals were too weak to break open tough dinosaur eggs.

  Wieland wrote, “The potent feeders on dinosaur eggs and young must be sought for amongst the dinosaurian themselves, and perchance, amongst the earliest varanids and boids (boa snakes).”

  According to Wieland, egg-eating must have been a normal practice in the Mesozoic and the diet of eggs even led to the evolution of some of the largest carnivore dinosaurs. Even the most caring of dinosaur mothers couldn’t stop the near-constant stealing of eggs by hungry carnivores.

  The predatory dinosaurs also reproduced by laying eggs, and Wieland suggested that their eggs became food for monitor lizards and snakes.

  Fossil evidence has confirmed that dinosaurs, snakes, and mammals preyed on dinosaur eggs and infants.

  90. Overpopulation rivalry.

  One of the consequences of overpopulation (a result of abundant food, dominating position of the species, and steady, warm climate) was a severe rivalry and competition amongst the dinosaurs, and they have killed each other. Only the avian dinosaurs survived because they could fly off from their enemies.

  91. Uranium poisoning.

  Most of the discovered dinosaur bones are highly radioactive. The bones displayed in museums are covered with heavily leaded paint to protect the visitors.

  Many dinosaur fossil discoveries are made with mobile Geiger-Müller counters for detecting radiation.

  According to scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas, the Cretaceous mass extinction was triggered by a star explosion, and the radioactive bones are evidence of the powerful gamma-ray burst.

  But some researchers suggest that the dinosaurs were poisoned by uranium, leached from the soil, causing cancer and unfavorable genetic mutations. Another theory suggests that the animals became radioactive during a Mesozoic nuclear war. Anyway, the plain fact is that dinosaur bones are radioactive.

  91. Movement of the Solar System in the Galaxy.

  The Solar System rotates around the core of the Galaxy, and it is also wobbling, moving up and down.

  Mikhail Medvedev and Adrian Melott suggested that the north side of the Galaxy generates a shock wave that exposes Earth to high-energy radiation every 62± 3 million years. Due to inherent asymmetry, the north side of the Milky Way is exposed to a larger cosmic ray flux than its south side.

  Their recent work has revealed the same 62 ± 3 million years cycle in fossil diversity in the past 542 million years.

  Earth, the biota, and every human are getting cosmic rays every day. When they increase in strength, the cosmic rays produce an avalanche of muons, secondary energetic particles, which can kill, damage, and cause mutations. Thousands of muons pass through our bodies every minute.

  Cosmic rays also impact climate by increasing the clouds and lowering the temperatures. They can change the ozone layer, too.

  The much higher level of cosmic rays, when the Solar System passes through the northern part of the Galaxy, caused periodic mass extinction, including the famous demise of the dinosaurs.

  92. Wobbling of the Galaxy.

  While rotating, the Milky Way Galaxy plane wobbles, and when the angle of the plane varies, there are more impacts of the celestial bodies. Additional dust and meteorites enter into the inner Solar System, causing mass extinctions.

  93. Hyperactive pituitary gland.

  Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, a Hungarian-born aristocrat, was an adventurer, a spy for Austria-Hungary, con
tender for the throne of Albania, head of the Hungarian Geological Institute, and a paleontologist.

  Nopcsa was one of the first researchers who tried to deduce the physiology and living behavior of the dinosaurs, at a time when paleontologists were mainly assembling bones. He was the first to suggest that archosaurs exhibited complex social behavior and cared for their young.

  Another of Nopcsa’s contributions was his theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

  He also created the theory of insular dwarfism, reduction in size of large animals when their population is limited to a small environment, primarily islands.

  Nopcsa believed that dinosaurs grew to their tremendous size thanks to secretions of their pituitary gland. Hyperactivity of the pituitary gland led also to excess growth of bones and cartilage. Secretions from the pituitary caused gigantism, partly by the production of large masses of cartilage as precursors of bone, and partly by acromegaly; this is a pathological excess thickening and overgrowth of limb bones and facial bones.

  He wrote that “the increase in weight of the limbs in the dinosaurs recalls the eunuch condition,” and many of them could not reproduce.

  Eventually, the gland drove the growth of dinosaurs to such excess that the animals became pathologically huge and grotesque, hindering the movement and efficiency of the dinosaurs, and they died off.

  94. Extraction of the Moon from Earth.

  The Moon was extracted from the Pacific Basin, upsetting the atmosphere and climate. Most of the species died off during the natural catastrophe.