WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DINOSAURS?

A number of different theories have been proposed to explain the death of the dinosaur. We know that about thirty species lived in North America from 120 to 200 million years ago. We also know that the dinosaur was not a very intelligent animal - most dinosaurs had very small brains and that they lived on earth for 100 million years. What we don't know is why they suddenly disappeared. Obviously something very unusual happened, which caused their death. There are a lot of possibilities. One is that North America was hit by an enormous drought. However, bones from thirty-five dinosaur species have just been discovered in China, and it has been found out that they died at the same time as the ones in America, so it seems very unlikely that drought was responsible.

 It was a world problem, not a local one, that killed them all. The popular idea that human beings killed the dinosaur is also wrong. Humans didn't arrive until a million years ago. Acid rain, surprisingly, is one of the newer theories. It is possible that pollution from acid rain was caused by a meteor crashing into the earth. Changes in climate might also have been responsible. Either an ice age (there have been two ice ages since then) or an increase in world temperatures could have been enough to kill the dinosaurs. Anyway, there is a lesson here for human beings. If the dinosaurs can all disappear, so can we.