Dinosaur Extinction Essay

65,000,000 years ago, an entire species was killed off. There are so many different theories of how the dinosaurs dissapeared. There are many different ways to explain the extinction which took place 65 million years ago. One of the main reasons was the possibility of a sudden change in the climate or atmosphere. For instance, a nearby supernova explosion could heat up the upper atmosphere, disturbing the ozone layer. Disturbing the ozone layer could produce large ice clouds which would cool the environment. If the dinosaurs were cold blooded they would not have been able to survive the horrible winters. Unlike mammals today, dinosaurs were not able to hibernate because they were unable to keep their body temperature level and they were too big. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could make the climate too hot. It could affect the sex of the eggs because it is determined by incubation temperature. The population would have been altered if the hot weather slowed down the male sperm, causing no more babies. If the dinosaurs were endothermic they could have become overheated and all died off (“Crazy Theories” 1). If the climate became too hot then several of the waters could have dried up. The environments …show more content…
Two hundred and fifty two years ago, huge volcanoes erupted in Siberia and continued to put out basalt lava and clouds of gases for up to five hundred thousand years (Benton 1). They were not the average cone shaped volcanoes we know today, instead they are huge rifts in the Earth’s crust (Benton 2). There is much evidence of the Deccan Traps in India took place around the same time as the dinosaur extinction. The Deccan Traps erupted on a huge scale, which could create a huge impact on the atmosphere and climate. This theory is the main alternative to the meteorite impact and can explain many of the observations including the shocked quarts and the glassy spherules (“Crazy Theorie”