What Killed The Dinosaurs?: The Great Mystery

John Hutchinson, Stanford University

This site presents theories about why the dinosaurs became extinct. The first page provides background information covering not only the "great dying" at the K-T boundary but also the mass extinction at the end of the Paleozoic Era. The author covers six factors that complicate the study of mass extinction including time resolution, the Signor-Lipps Effect, and falsifiability. A link then takes the reader to a second page where invalid extinction hypotheses are explained. These range from "hay fever killed the dinosaurs" to "the dinosaurs just faded away," (no causation implied). The final link leads us to current thinking about extinction including volcanism, plate tectonics, and the Alvarez Hypothesis.


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Subject: Geoscience:Geology, Atmospheric Science:Climatology , Biology
Resource Type: Scientific Resources:Overview/Reference Work
Focus on the Cretaceous: Tectonics, Paleontology
Topics: Climate, Biosphere, Time/Earth History, Solid EarthKeywords: shocked quartz, periodicity, Oort cloud, Deccan traps, nuclear winter, greenhouse effect, fern spike