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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."
Hmmm. Somehow I thought I had logged in on that last post.....
Or perhaps that giant asteroid cracked the Earth's crust in enough places that the land basically flattened out or sunk beneath the ocean. And therefore the water covered the entire face of the earth (within about 40 days maybe0. Then over the next 300 something days the plates shifted around and eventually reformed mountains and ravines, giving us this story of Noah and a global flood that seems to pervade just about every culture around the world.
Besides that, the evaporative cooling from the water run-off as the plates pushed up would likely cause some really nice ice cold temperatures that might help explain our polar ice caps.
However, even if Noah did save two baby dinosaurs for each available dinosaur species, the harsher post asteroid/flood climates and smaller food quantities could make it difficult to survive long term for the really large animals. And if those hungry dinosaurs decided to start eating humans, then I'm sure the humans would opt to eliminate that particular creature.