Dinosours essays

Dinosours essays Dinosaurs: How they became extinct something happened 65 million years ago, at the end of the cretaceous period, something so devastating that it altered the course of life on earth. It seems like it happened so sudden, as geological time goes, that almost all the dinosaurs living on earth disappeared. So how did these dominant creatures just die off? Was it a slow extinction, or did it happen all of the sudden? These questions bring rise to many different beliefs on how the dinosaurs disappeared over 65 million years ago. Extinction itself is easily defined: When the birth rate fails to keep up with the death rate, it is called extinction. But, the definition does not answer the question about the nature or the causes of extinction. Paleontologists generally divide extinction into two types. The first is called background extinction, isolated extinction of species due to a variety of causes. Included is depletion of resources in a habitat, change in climate, the eruption of a volca no, or the destruction of a forest or wetland habitat. The second type of extinction is called mass extinction. There are four main components involved: large number of species go extinct; many types of species go extinct; the effects must be global; and the effects must occur in a geologically short period of time. The dinosaur could not have lived forever. No creatures, no plants, no tiny bacteria are forever, not even Homo sapiens. Extinction is the fate of all species. One theory on how the dinosaurs became extinct is that of carbon dioxide, and the greenhouse effect. Volcanos produced the proposed conditions. A massive volcanic eruption could have saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide so that it caused a sharp rise in temperatures worldwide. The excessive carbon dioxide could have permitted solar energy to enter the atmosphere but would have blocked the radiation of most surface heat back out into space, therefore causing the gre ...