Dinos Not Killed Off by Meteor, but by Worms

Confident speculations that a big meteor hitting southern Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs appear to be unraveling.  Gerta Keller [Princeton, 09/25/2003], a doubter of the story that has been a leading contender for years with its smoking-gun crater called Chicxulub in the Yucatan, has been getting a receptive hearing among geologists with her claim that the impact was too early, reports Science Daily: “The Chicxulub impact could not have caused the mass extinction,” she is telling a meeting of the Geological Society of America, “because this impact predates the mass extinction and apparently didn’t cause any extinctions.”
    If a later impact was responsible, its crater has not been found.  Keller believes a combination of factors – multiple impacts, and global warming due to massive volcanic outbursts – was involved.
    Another competing explanation won’t be quite as photogenic for animators.  A Reuters story (see MSNBC) proposes that gut worms brought the mighty beasts down.

This upset is just the next episode in a long line of speculations about what happened to the dinosaurs.  They thought they finally had it nailed with the big crater in Mexico.  Now that the impact theory is coming under fire, it’s going to be a hard sell with these new scenarios.  Why didn’t the worms afflict the mammals and birds that came through the extinction unscathed?  Why didn’t global warming and volcanism have the same effect on all animal groups?  Dinosaurs, remember, inhabited almost every longitude and latitude on the globe, and were successfully adaptive in a wide variety of climes.
    If they perished in a world-wide flood, however, and the remaining stock were hunted to extinction as pests by humans, this would fit the evidence.  The flood was accompanied by volcanism and, maybe, triggered by meteor impacts.  If this sounds too radical, it’s no more radical than finding soft tissue inside the bones of a T. rex (02/22/2006).  Evolutionists haven’t been able to hold onto an explanation that fits the evidence any better.  The Science Daily article ended,What the microfossils are saying is that Chicxulub probably aided the demise of the dinosaurs, but so did Deccan trap volcanism’s greenhouse warming effect and finally a second huge impact that finished them off.  So where’s the crater?
    “I wish I knew,” said Keller.  “There is some evidence that it may have hit in India, where a crater of about 500 kilometers in diameter is estimated and named Shiva by paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee from the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock.  The evidence for it, however, is not very compelling at this time.”

The confusion about the role of meteors and extinctions is rippling into other news reports.  The Times Online printed a story speculating that a meteor hitting the Irish Sea upset the ecology and gave T. rex the edge.  On the other hand, USC scientists are abandoning the meteor for the earlier Permian extinction, according to EurekAlert.  David Bottjer and Matthew Clapham point to evidence the animals were in decline long before the extinction.  Instead of picturing a sudden, meteoric event, they are simply claiming “the earth got sick.” Microfossils don’t talk.  But we have a record that does talk.  The Biblical flood account works.  Only stubborn naturalistic philosophy and uniformitarian assumptions prevent it from being considered seriously.  For a detailed analysis by a scientist who does take it seriously, search Walt Brown’s site for the sections on dinosaurs.
    A retired high school biology teacher responds:  “Regarding the theory that it was intestinal parasites that killed the dinosaurs and your question as to why other animals were not affected–it is a strong case against global worming.”  This proves that the CEH pun bug is infectious: beware!