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Did Insects Kill the Dinosaurs?
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Asteroid impacts, massive volcanic flows, and now biting, disease-carrying insects have been put forward as an important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs. In the Late Cretaceous the world was covered with warm-temperate to tropical areas that swarmed with blood-sucking insects. A theory explored by researchers at Oregon State suggests these bugs carried leishmania, malaria, intestinal parasites, arboviruses and other pathogens. Repeated epidemics may have slowly-but-surely worn down dinosaur populations while ticks, mites, lice and biting flies tormented and weakened them. 'After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases,' says Researcher George Poinar. 'But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them.' The confluence of new insect-spread diseases, loss of traditional food sources, and competition for plants by insect pests could all have provided a lingering, debilitating condition that dinosaurs were ultimately unable to overcome."
You're mistaken on the principle of parasitism, possibly confusing it on some level with symbiosis. Parasites don't need to keep a host alive. Many parasites kill their hosts (as intended). Parasitic wasps, for instance, lay eggs inside their hosts which then hatch with the larva proceeding to eat the host from the inside out. Such wasps are in fact sometimes used as a "natural" method of pest control.
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Although "Dinosaur" is used very widely, and often used to refer to extinct reptiles like the Pliseosaur, Pteridon, or Leoplurodon; the groups wiped out were, properly speaking, the Therapods (popularly the T-Rex, Velociraptors, and their kin) and the Sauropods (Brachiasaur, Triceritops, etc). Neither of these groups survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretatious period.
Sharks are sharks, Ceolocanths are fish, and Aligators are reptiles. Although all three forms date back very nearly how they look now to the time of the dinosaurs, it would be an equivocation to call them "dinosaurs" when discussing the "extinction of the dinoasurs".
Apologies for spelling, mine is pretty poor.
"and the Sauropods (Brachiasaur, Triceritops, etc)"
Triceratops wasn't a sauropod. Like other marginocephalians, it was a member of one of three orithischian (bird hipped) groups (the other two are threophora which includes armoured dinosaurs such as ankylosaurus and stegosaurus, and ornithopods such as the hadrosaurs). Sauropods were saurischian (lizard hipped), and are therefore more closely related to therapods than either are to the ornithischians.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.