Open the door, get on the floor, everyone kill the dinosaur
You don't have to be funk meisters Was (Not Was) to know a meteor impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Well it turns out we could be wrong. According to a report on Eureka!, this theory is being seriously challenged.
It is thought the poor dinos went belly up after a very big rock smashed into the Earth, leaving a 180km-wide crater for us to find underneath the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
Considered the 'smoking gun', the crater was found to be just below the geological Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, which saw the dinosaurs, along with many plants and other animals, disappear. Or evolve into birds, which ever way you look at it.
However, a crack-team of clever people now reckon the impact occurred some 300,000 years before the mass extinction.
They believe the asteroid didn't have anything like the dramatic impact bestowed on it, and it was actually volcanic eruptions in India which cause the mayhem.
So what did push the dinos off the edge and, ultimately, give us lot a chance to rule the world?
Here are some of the theories:
High levels of carbon dioxide destroyed dinosaur embryos. Or low levels meant the dinos forgot how to breath. Bleedin' scientists can't agree on anything.
A nearby supernova explosion could have sent the Earth into a sudden deep freeze.
Caterpillars ate all the plants, leaving nothing for the herbivores to munch.
Too much oxygen. Flowering plants are very efficient at producing oxygen, which will increase the rate of metabolism in animal tissue. If this rate is too high, especially in large animals, they may not be able to eat sufficient food to survive.
Wobbling of the galactic plane. If the angle of this plane varies, dust and meteorites can be swept our way, and there are more impact events than usual.
Lice, worms and flies ganged up and overwhelmed the dinosaur population.
Weird Science Facoid: The largest internal organ is the small intestine. Despite being called the smaller of the two intestines, your small intestine is actually four times as long as the average adult is tall. It's just packed in tighter than Posh Spice's suitcase.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
Whatever the reason or cause of their extinction maybe that's part of the world's changes. And I think that's better because people can't live with dinosaurs. PFGBest