Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs

Anna Bozlinski

One of the great mysteries in science is the dinosaurs. Where did they come from? How did they live? How come we don’t have them with us anymore? Did they even exist or are they just a figment of our imaginations that we believe because that’s what we were told? Are there any animals alive now that are ancestors of theirs? For decades, scientists have been trying to answer these questions plus many more. Some are even more complex and detailed than the average mind would even think of or care about. Three of the main questions are: How did they die? Are there any modern ancestors of dinosaurs running around? and Is there any evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time? There are many theories and opinions about each one of these questions. Some evidence has yet to be discovered. We may never know the answer to some of the puzzling questions. For the time being there is lots of evidence to sift through.

Dinosaurs appear in the fossil record around the Mesozoic Era. They were the dominant life form for the next 140 million years.¹⁵Dinosaurs became extinct at the boundary between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. This is often called the “K-T extinction.” The search for the cause of the extinction has been a puzzling area of science. This extinction is an example of a mass extinction. About 2/3 of the species below the K-T line are not present above it. There are no new species of dinosaur around the K-T line. The dinosaurs could have just faded away because they weren’t evolving.¹⁴ However, most scientists think they became extinct through some global catastrophe. Most think this was the impact of a giant asteroid. The rock from the crater made by the asteroid’s impact covered the ground while tsunamis swept over the land. The heat wave would have caused forest fires to spread throughout the world. Thick clouds from dust an asteroid in space and smoke covered the earth for months. Plants died from the fires and lack of sunlight. Chemicals from the asteroid formed acid rain which killed even more organisms.⁴There is a crater under the ocean along the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula that could have possibly been the impact point of the asteroid. Dinosaur fossils were on the decline at the K-T line, and the asteroid could have finished them off. Scientists also believe that there were temperature drops at the end of the Mesozoic Era which helped cause the dinosaur extinctions because the plants were dying so the dinosaurs couldn’t get enough food which made the dinosaurs die. Some other theories are cosmic radiation from a nearby exploding supernova, acid rain from volcanic activity, continental drift, disease, and small animals that fed on dinosaur eggs.¹⁵

A space shuttle picture of the Manicougan Crater. It is more than 43 miles in diameter. The crater created by the impact at the end of the Mesozoic was three times this size. (NASA)

There is another theory that millions of years of volcanic eruptions changed the face of the earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The eruptions dumped large enough amounts of carbon dioxide into the air to cause long term global warming. Because of the added heat, the plants died which caused a lack of food for the dinosaurs. There is a large enough volcanic deposit in the Deccan Traps in India that could have caused this.⁶A supernova near the earth could have caused the plants and animals to die from the radiation. Neutrinos from the explosion would cause genetic mutations and cancers. The increased cloud cover from the cosmic rays would have caused starvation. The radiation from the supernova would destroy the ozone layer which would kill the plants and ultimately the food would collapse and die, and a supernova everything would die.⁵Dinosaurs most likely did get sick. There are some fossils that deformities that could have been caused by arthritis, cancers, or infections. Most fossils don’t show evidence of diseases, but then again most diseases don’t affect the bones which are pretty much the only thing fossilized from the dinosaurs.³Mankind kills off anything that poses a threat to them. Man could have killed off all the big dinosaurs.¹²One of these elements on its own could not account for all the dinosaurs disappearing around the same time, but two or more at the same time could have done it.¹⁵There is not enough data to say whether there was a sudden catastrophe or the dinosaurs simply died off. Although, organisms can disappear from the fossil record before they actually become extinct.¹⁴

Dinosaurs had an uncanny resemblance to birds.⁷Scientists have come to believe that birds are dinosaurs. In the early 1900’s, Gerhard Heilmann compared every feature of dinosaurs and birds. He was about to agree that dinosaurs were birds, but he decided not to because no known species of coelurosaur had a collarbone. He, instead, decided that they just shared a common ancestor.⁸ In 1964, John Ostrom revived the idea that birds were dinosaurs. A new method of classifying organisms called cladistics supported his idea.⁹Cladistics says that the differences don’t count, only the similarities.¹⁶There were 130 shared characteristics between birds and dinosaurs. This rejected the old theory that dinosaurs were reptiles.⁹Most paleontologists say that birds are avian dinosaurs while other dinosaurs are non-avian dinosaurs, and birds are technically considered reptiles. A man named Huxley and other scientists have seen a striking resemblance between birds and theropod dinosaurs. Birds are theropod dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx lithographica is an example of a transitional species between birds and reptiles. Archaeopteryx is accepted as the oldest known bird and is considered to be an important link between birds and other coelurosaurs to help shed light on the group’s evolutionary history. For people who know what they are talking about, it has become harder and harder to draw the line between birds and non-avian dinosaurs. Birds and reptiles have many similarities. Birds have scales on their feet, and their feathers are made by tissues similar to those that make scales. Reptiles and birds both lay eggs. Their anatomies’ are fairly similar. There are a lot of bone and skeletal similarities. Coelurosaurs are thought to be the closest relatives to birds, and some even say that birds are coelurosaurs. Bones are used for classifying animals in the fossil record because they are normally the only thing preserved in the fossils. One difficulty in this theory is the gap between the first known bird and the dromaeoaurs which is the sister group of the birds. There are also fragments of remains of possible dromaeosaurs in the same layer as the first known bird. There are many missing bits of information on the links between birds and dinosaurs. People who oppose the dinosaur-bird hypothesis don’t provide another one in its stead. This is probably because there aren’t any other likely candidates for avian ancestors. The opponents don’t normally use methods and evidence excepted by the rest of the science world. They use more of intuition than processes and things that can be and are tested. There are many more hard facts for the dinosaur bird theory than anything else. The living birds are very different from extinct birds. They would not look the same because species evolve and develop somewhat over time.²Heilmann was able to banish theropods from the birds’ family tree for 50 years because a collarbone could not be lost and then reacquired later on. Theropods really did have clavicles that were fused together to form a furcula. Theropod furculae were usually mislabeled as belly ribs. Most paleontologists agree that theropod dinosaurs are the grandparents of modern day birds.¹⁶

Humans appeared on the fossil record millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct.Dr. Cabrera found human remains next to some plant specimens that existed during the end of the dinosaur age.¹Some human footprints have been found right next to dinosaur footprints. Others have even been found inside those of dinosaurs.¹⁰glen Kuban saw some discoloration in the human footprints of the Paluxy River bed. He discovered that they were actually dinosaur prints that had been altered by mud fill.¹¹Carvings and cave paintings of dinosaur-like animals are numerous.¹³There are cave paintings in Zimbabwe made by bushmen who ruled from 1500 B.C. to a couple hundred years ago that show dinosaurs as well as modern day animals like elephants. Cave paintings and dinosaur tracks have been found in the Hava Supai Canyon in Arizona.¹¹At Acambaro, Mexico, there are dinosaur figurines that are anatomically correct. Some of these features on the dinosaurs were not discovered by scientists until a short time ago. Carbon dating done on the stones at Acambaro has placed them from around 4500 and 3500 years ago.

Cave Paintings

Sumerian and Egyptian artifacts have also shown dinosaurs along with humans.¹There are examples in the Bible of humans living along side animals that match the description of dinosaurs. Job had encounters with two of them, behemoth and leviathan. Scientists have also found unfossilized dinosaur bones. Among these is a T-rex bone with red blood cells still present. This could not have happened if they were over 65 million years old. Dinosaurs are reptiles, and reptiles never stop growing until they die. The older they are the bigger they get. The life expectancies for people went down to around a hundred or so years around the time of the flood. God probably would not have chosen the largest and oldest animals to be cramped on the ark and repopulate the earth. The life expectancy of the reptiles would then go down and so would the size of the animals.¹³Humans have a habit of killing off anything that poses a threat to them. They probably would have killed off the large reptiles.¹²

There is compelling evidence for every side of these arguments. No matter how you look at it, it is hard to dispute the fact that huge creatures did in fact exist. We just don’t know all of the details of their life and death or what legacies and ancestors they left behind. There are still many puzzling questions about the dinosaurs left untouched. The world may never know just what happened to the dinosaurs. Then again, some things are better left untouched, and some things were not meant for us to know so no matter how hard we try we may never figure out some mysteries.

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