Giant lizards have ruled our planet for an incredibly long time, and the reasons for their death are shrouded in mystery. Many hypotheses have been put forward. But not everyone stands up to scrutiny. One of the latest versions, for example, claims that the land dinosaurs were killed by butterflies.
1. Died of hunger
“Breeding without stopping, the voracious caterpillars of butterflies deprived dinosaurs of food,” says Brian Svitek, an American paleontologist and researcher at the New Jersey State Museum, where the bones of the lizards are kept. - As a result, the lizards became extinct for a banal reason: hunger.
According to Svitek, 66-65 million years ago, the Earth looked like a huge blooming garden. There were no birds then, and therefore the butterflies felt at ease, breeding tirelessly. And the caterpillars, before turning into butterflies, ate exclusively on plants - the main food of herbivorous dinosaurs. Countless armies of Lepidoptera devoured greenery over vast expanses.
And the fewer herbivorous dinosaurs became, the hungrier the predators were. So they all died out together.
Svitek's theory of butterflies diversified a series of hypotheses explaining why dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the Earth. Before him, it was believed that the lizards were killed by something larger - for example, an asteroid impact, massive volcanic eruptions, comic rays. Or our ancestors - mammals that have already appeared, who ate eggs from dinosaurs, while themselves remained elusive for less nimble giants.
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2. Eating eggs
Paleontologist George Wieland at the beginning of the 20th century argued that dinosaurs ate themselves and thereby doomed themselves to extinction. In his opinion, the ancestors of the terrible tyrannosaurs probably took their first step towards gigantism, starting to feed on sauropod eggs. Even the most caring dinosaur mothers could not prevent hungry predators from poaching.
3. Deformation of the shell
Invertebrate fossil expert G. K. Erben and his colleagues also believed eggs contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs, but not in the way described in the first paragraph. In the 1979 newspaper, the researchers published a version that the analysis of the composition of fragments of fossilized eggshells found in the south of France and in the Spanish Pyrenees showed two types of deviations: the shell of some eggs was multilayered and thick, while others were extremely thin.
Any of these situations was fatal: in multilayered eggs, embryos would suffocate, and eggs with thin shells could easily crack and cause dehydration of the embryos or become easy prey for a predator.
4. Overactive glands
Paleontologist Franz Nopksa von Felso-Zilvas at the beginning of the 20th century suggested that dinosaurs grew to incredible sizes due to the malfunctioning of the pituitary gland. In the end, the gland caused the animals to become pathologically huge and grotesque. Nopksa has tried to link human pathologies to the extinction mystery of the dinosaurs, but there is no credible evidence that the pituitary gland could have influenced dinosaur size or extinction.
5. Evolutionary self-destruction
There is a theory that some species of living things "follow the path of dinosaurs" - in other words, in the process of evolution they become too lethargic, stupid or small to survive. For a while, paleontologists believed that this was exactly what happened to the dinosaurs.
6. Too many males
Over the past decade, fertility specialist Sherman Zilber has repeatedly argued that the dinosaurs died because they could not find a mate.
Zilber suggested that, similar to modern alligators and crocodiles, changes in external temperature could determine the sex of dinosaur embryos during development in eggs. In this case, climate changes caused by volcanic activity and the fall of an asteroid could be the reason that the vast majority of the eggs hatched males.
However, we still do not know whether temperature influenced the development of the sexual characteristics of dinosaurs or not.
7. Cataract
In 1982, ophthalmologist L. R. Croft suggested that poor eyesight was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. With prolonged heat exposure, cataracts develop faster, and Croft decided that dinosaurs with horns or fancy ridges on their heads used these "decorations" to protect them from the merciless sun of the Mesozoic era. However, even this did not save the dinosaurs' eyes, and they eventually lost sight before puberty.
8. Supernova
In 1971, physicist Wallace Tucker and paleontologist Dale Russell suggested that the explosion of a supernova located quite close to the solar system at the end of the Cretaceous period could have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth.
As a result of such a supernova explosion, the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere were exposed to X-rays and other types of radiation, which caused a rapid climate change, and the temperature on Earth began to drop rapidly, but no evidence of such an event was found.
9. Aliens
An exhibition at the Museum of Prehistory at the College of Eastern Utah shows that the aliens could not have destroyed the dinosaurs, if only because there were no fossils of the aliens themselves or traces of their activities. However, the lack of evidence hasn't stopped some creative people from proposing such sci-fi scenarios.
10. Fart
Another unscientific hypothesis is that dinosaurs doomed themselves to extinction by their own farts. Last year, paleontologist David Wilkinson and his colleagues attempted to calculate how much gas a giant, long-necked sauropod could produce.
The researchers theorized that dinosaurs may have emitted enough methane to affect the global climate. But in the end, various sauropods have lived on Earth for tens of millions of years without showing any signs of gas poisoning themselves. Regardless of real research, Wilkinson and his colleagues drew evidence from thematic sites and proved the correctness of this theory for a long time.