Several similar fossil findings of “carcass explosion” were identified. It became the most broadly accepted explanation for the specific bone position and was cited in dozens of academic papers.
29. Dinosaurs are still alive.
Dinosaurs are still alive but they live in the future. When humans reach the future ages, if they survive so long, they will find out that the future is already colonized by dinosaurian civilization. Shortly before the end of Cretaceous, a dinosaur species became intelligent and created a time machine, denying in that way a future for humans.
30. Super hot LIPs.
Matthew Jackson and his team at Boston University suggested that the largest extinctions can be traced back to specific massive eruptions, originating from two unusually hot spots in the mantle.
Deep in the Earth, there are giant blobs of super-hot magma, which sometimes flood large regions of the surface, at least 100,000 square kilometers, leaving behind distinct geological regions known as large igneous provinces (LIPs). Deccan Traps is one such formation; it was formed at the time when the dinosaurs were killed off.
31. Something tilted Earth’s orbit.
The seasons are not caused by the orbit of our planet around the Sun and distance from the Sun; instead, they are caused by the tilt of Earth’s axis, which is 23.4 degrees in regards to the ecliptic plane (this is the plane in which Earth orbits the Sun).
When Earth is more tilted we have extremely hot summers and severe winters; a less tilted planet means temperate seasons, comfortably warm summers, and mild winters.
The Earth wobbles in space so that its tilt changes between about 22 and 25 degrees on a cycle of about 41,000 years.
Sixty-six million years ago, the orbit tilt of our planet was sharply changed, which caused extreme temperatures, changes in seasonality and precipitation, drastic climate disturbances on the entire planet, tsunamis, earthquakes, reduced availability of vegetation and food, and aggravated habitats and reproduction, which are the major factors influencing the extinction of species.
In the scenario of cooling, the dinosaurs couldn’t adapt to the cold, dry climate, but the furry mammals could successfully adjust to the new conditions.
Research confirms that toward the end of the Cretaceous period there were significant changes: seasons appeared, temperatures became lower, there was a drop in sea level, and there were greater extremes between equatorial and polar temperatures.
Changes of orbit and tilt could be caused by other celestial bodies or by the rotation of the Galaxy and the Universe. They could be periodic and accidental.
32. Dinosaurs left Earth.
At the end of Cretaceous, dinosaurs evolved and, in only a few hundred thousand years, just like humans, they developed a sophisticated civilization. Dinosaurs left the Earth 66 million years ago because they knew about the imminent comet catastrophe. Sometimes their decedents are still visiting Earth but they are not intervening in the new emerging primitive civilization of humans. We should keep in mind that dinosaurs had a 66-million-years head start, and now their civilization is so sophisticated that it is beyond our comprehension.
Eyewitnesses of UFO contacts sometimes describe dinosaurian aliens, often called reptoids. They have reptilian skin and nostrils, clawlike fingers, large, elongated eyes, etc.
33. Ancient humans killed off the dinosaurs.
Human bones, tools, footprints, and dinosaur bones coexist in the same fossil layers.
There are numerous ancient images, figurines, legends, and tales of dinosaurs.
34. Caterpillars exterminated the dinosaurs.
At the end of the Cretaceous, the ancient fern-like plants were replaced by phanerogamic (seed-producing) plants, which lead to the emergence of insects, including caterpillars, feeding only on such plants.
Stanley Flanders, an entomologist from the University of California, suggested in his article “Did the caterpillar exterminate the giant reptile?” that “It is evident that the plant-consuming capacity of a caterpillar population could equal that of giant reptile population.” “The inherent weakness of the reptile was an extraordinary need for abundance of plant material. Only a few years of plant scarcity could have exterminated it.”
The Cretaceous caterpillars evolved at a rapid rate and ate off the vegetation, leaving nothing for the huge herbivore dinosaurs to chew. In turn, the dinosaurian carnivores died off, too, because of the lack of meat food. Obviously, catching caterpillars and nippy mammals the size of a rat was not enough to survive.
35. Flood.
Genesis 7, New King James Version.
“Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Come into the ark, you and all your household, because I have seen that you are righteous before Me in this generation. You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female; also seven each of birds of the air, male and female, to keep the species alive on the face of all the earth. For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.’ And Noah did according to all that the Lord commanded him. Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters were on the earth.”
Well, Noah saved many species, but forgot (after all, he was six hundred years old) or had no time to take dinosaurs or some eggs on the Ark, and they perished in the Flood.
36. Hydrogen cosmic cloud.
In 1939, Fred Hoyle suggested that collisions with cosmic clouds might obliterate the heliosphere every now and then.
The heliosphere is a huge region of space surrounding the Sun, a sort of bubble, extending beyond the orbit of Pluto. Plasma “blown” out from the Sun, known as the solar wind, creates and maintains this bubble against the outside pressure of the interstellar medium, the hydrogen and the helium that permeate our Galaxy.
Toward the end of Cretaceous period, Earth passed through a huge cloud of hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms from Earth’s atmosphere combined and produced tremendous quantities of water, greatly reducing the oxygen to breathe, and caused events similar to the Biblical Flood. Dinosaurs and most of the species died out.
Another hydrogen cloud scenario suggests that passing sometimes through thick clouds of hydrogen gas, huge amounts of hydrogen are falling into the Sun, causing it to burn brighter. The increased amount of solar radiation raised temperatures. The global warming and the skin cancer due to the high levels of harmful radiation exterminated most of the species.
It is also possible that the hydrogen cloud greatly reduced the solar radiation on Earth, causing prolonged periods of winter spells, changing the Cretaceous subtropical climate on Earth. The cold weather and lack of enough light destroyed a large proportion of the vegetation, and there was not enough food for the animals who survived the cold spell.
Another scenario: the thick hydrogen gas cloud inflamed in the atmosphere, burned to death billions of animals, and obliterated most of the vegetation. In the K-Pg boundary layer clay there are large amounts of soot from this hyper wildfire.
A scenario suggests that when the Solar System, orbiting around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, passed through clouds of hydrogen gas, it caused a huge environmental impact because the increased water vapor in the stratosphere cooled the atmosphere. The hydrogen destroyed the ozone layer.
Gary P. Zank of the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware created a computer animation, showing how even a small cosmic cloud could suddenly burst the “breathing bubble” of Earth. According to Zank, close encounters with cosmic clouds cause periodic extinctions.
“We’re surrounded by hot gas,” Zank noted. “As our sun moves through extremely ‘empty’ or low-density interstellar space, the solar wind produces a protective bubble—the heliosphere around our solar system, which allows life to flourish on Earth. Unfortunately, we could bump into a small cloud at any time, and we probably won’t see it coming. Without the heliosphere, neutral hydrogen would
interact with our atmosphere, possibly producing catastrophic climate changes, while our exposure to deadly cosmic radiation in the form of very high-energy cosmic rays would increase.”
The Solar System orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy, moving at about 800 thousand kilometers an hour (about 500 thousand miles an hour) in a huge orbit.
Moving through the Galaxy, oscillating up and down as the Solar Sytem sails through all sorts of environments. The space is full of molecular clouds.
Zank said that our immediate or local interstellar environment is chock-full of gas clusters known as the Local Fluff. “We won’t know that our heliosphere is collapsing until we see highly elevated levels of neutral hydrogen and cosmic rays, and a hydrogen wall in the vicinity of the outer planets.
“The protective solar wind would be extinguished, and cosmic radiation might lead to gene mutations. Hydrogen would bombard Earth, producing increased cloud cover, leading perhaps to global warming, or extreme amounts of precipitation and ice ages. We can’t predict every scenario at this point.”
37. Collision of neutron stars or black holes.
Twin stars are merging constantly somewhere in the Galaxy, and produce hard radiation in the form of gamma and cosmic rays that strike Earth. However, the merging stars are far away to do any damage and the radiation is harmlessly absorbed by the ozone layer.
But occasionally twin neutron stars collide close to our planet, and the effects on the Earth are devastating. The cosmic radiation destroys the protective layers of the atmosphere.
Israeli scientists Arnon Dar, Nir Shaviv, and Ari Lior from the Space Research Institute at the Technion University suggested that high-energy cosmic ray jets from nearby mergers of neutron stars, hitting Earth’s atmosphere, produce lethal fluxes of atmospheric muons at ground level, underground, and underwater, and can destroy the ozone layer and radioactivate the environment, frying most of the vegetation and obliterating almost all animal life. They could have caused most of the mass extinctions on our planet in the past 600 million years. Biological mutations due to ionizing radiations could have stimulated the fast appearance of new species after the extinctions.
“The study is actually an attempt to solve the biggest murder case in the history of life on Earth,” said Arnon Dar.
Gamma ray bursts may also be caused by the collision of black holes. They can release as much energy in a few seconds as a supernova.
38. Nemesis and periodic comet showers.
According to this theory, the Solar System has two suns, the visible one and one still unseen, the Nemesis (or Death Star), both forming a double-star system, like most stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Nemesis hypothesis was born from the suggestion made in 1983 by David Raup and J. John Sepkoski Jr., using rigorous statistical analyses of the fossil record, that the last ten major mass extinctions showed a noticeable periodicity. They proposed an average time span between extinctions of about 26 million years.
The Raup-Sepkoski hypothesis started a round of speculations on the possible extraterrestrial causes. Nature magazine published a series of articles on the subject.
Marc Davis, Piet Hut, and Richard Muller published in 1984 in Nature the article “Extinction of species by periodic comet showers.”
They proposed that these periodic extinctions are triggered by an unseen companion to the Sun, called Nemesis (the goddess of retributive justice), travelling in an eccentric orbit, which at its closest approach passes through the Oort cloud of comets. During each passage this unseen companion of the Sun perturbs their orbits, sending a large number of comets into the inner Solar System. Several of them hit the Earth. At present Nemesis should be approximately at its maximum distance from the Sun, about 2.4 light years.
39. Nibiru killed them off.
A planet-sized object, usually referred as Planet X or Nibiru, passes in long-period orbit through the inner Solar System on a regular basis, causing mass extinctions with each flyby of Earth.
According to a 6,000-year-old Sumerian description, our Solar System has one more planet called Nibiru, which means “Planet of the crossing.”
According to Zecharia Sitchin’s interpretation of Babylonian texts, the giant planet called Nibiru or Marduk passes by Earth every 3,600 years.
Proponents of the Niburu theory claim that it is not impossible that the Sun has a distant planetary companion, and such an object is very far from the observed regions of the Solar System. It has no detectable gravitational effect on the other planets.
40. Overdose theory.
According to “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs” by Stephen Jay Gould, published in Discover Magazine, “Drugs: Angiosperms (flowering plants) first evolved toward the end of the dinosaurs’ reign. Many of these plants contain psychoactive agents, avoided by mammals today as a result of their bitter taste. Dinosaurs had neither means to taste the bitterness nor livers effective enough to detoxify the substances. They died of massive overdoses.”
Most mammals were “smart” enough to avoid these potential poisons.
The overdose theory has been proposed by the psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel. He has gathered more than 2,000 records of animals who, when having access, administer various drugs to themselves—from a swig of alcohol to massive doses of heroin. He also argued that death by overdose may help explain why so many dinosaur fossils are found in contorted positions.
41. The flowering plants exterminated them.
The flowering plants (angiosperms) appeared at the end of the Cretaceous period and most of the animals could not adapt to the new vegetation. The availability of gymnosperms and ferns was reduced, leading to cutback of fern oils in their diets, and to death by terminal constipation of the herbivores.
A variation of this theory suggested that the dinosaurs went extinct due to allergy and hay fever. Thepollen ofthe flowering (angiosperm) plants aggravated the dinosaurs and they died from allergic reactions to these new vegetation.
Another variation states that tannins, alkaloids, and other poisons in the angiosperms killed off the dinosaurs.
42. Male-female imbalance.
In their article “Environmental versus genetic sex determination: a possible factor in dinosaur extinction?,” D. Miller, J. Summers, and S. Silber, fertility experts at the University of Leeds, suggested the theory that the male-female imbalance caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Mammals, birds, all snakes, most lizards, amphibians, etc., use specific sex-determining chromosomes or genes. The sex determination genetically is generally through chromosome combinations. The XX/XY sex-determination system is the most familiar, as it is found in humans. Females have two of the same kind of sex chromosome (XX), while males have two distinct sex chromosomes (XY).
Reptiles have a different type of metabolism to mammals and have various ways of determining the sex of their offspring.
Some reptiles, however, including all crocodilians, many turtles, and some lizards use environmental or temperature-dependent sex determination. The temperature at which eggs are incubated affects the sex of the fetus.
Global temperature change can distort the male-female ratio of temperature-dependent sex determination animals and might have played a significant role in the demise of many extinct species, notably the dinosaurs, particularly if the temperature change resulted in a preponderance of males.
“The Earth did not become so toxic that life died out 65 million years ago; the temperature just changed, and these great beasts had not evolved a genetic mechanism (like our Y chromosome) to cope with that,” said Sherman Silber.
How did turtles and crocodiles survive the mass extinction?
“These animals live at the intersection of aquatic and terrestrial environments, in estuarine waters and river beds, which might have afforded some protection against the more extreme effects of environmental change, hence giving them more time to adapt,” the researchers answered.
43. Impact debr
is killed dinosaurs.
Debris from the impact of comets, asteroids, or other space bodies in space entered Earth’s atmosphere, darkened the skies and caused low temperatures, destroying most major food chains.
44. Frozen combustibles from space.
Space bodies consisting mainly of frozen gases and liquids like methane, hydrogen, alcohol, acetylene, ethane, etc., entered Earth’s atmosphere and caused a huge explosion, obliterating most of the animal and plant species.
45. Poisonous dust cloud.
A huge space cloud of toxic dust and possibly poisonous gases entered the Solar System, killing off the species.
46. No food, no oxygen.
The number of the dinosaurs due to the favorable conditions on Earth became so huge and numerous that they consumed almost all plants. The oxygen production was greatly reduced; the carbon dioxide levels increased. The oxygen was not enough, the food was scarce, the carbon dioxide was too much, and most of the species died out.
47. Hot testicles.
The theory that the testicles of the dinosaurs were impaired by higher temperature was published in the article “Rate of temperature increase in the dinosaurs” by E. Colbert, R. Cowles, and C. Bogert in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in 1946.
Colbert, Cowles, and Bogert suggested that large dinosaurs lived at their optimum temperatures (it was not easy to cool their huge bodies) and the rise in temperatures at the end of the Cretaceous caused them to overheat.
The hotter climate led to a rise in temperature of the testicles, and the dinosaurs went extinct by the sterilization of the males because the testes function only in a narrow range of temperature.
Testicles of the mammals hang externally in a scrotal sac because internal body temperatures are too high for them to function properly.
Dinosaur Killers Page 12
