Dinosaur Extinction Story Becomes More Chancy

Why did dinosaurs die but birds and butterflies survive?  The latest idea involves sheer dumb luck.

The consensus view that an impact killed the dinosaurs is not without problems.  Why did it affect all the dinosaurs, when some were as small as chickens?  Why did they all perish, when dinosaurs had supposedly ruled the earth for 160 million years, enduring every other kind of catastrophe the earth could throw at them?

Nature News now says that the problem was timing.  “Animals might have survived if impact happened a few million years earlier or later,” Alexandra Witze says.   It is, of course, impossible to prove a counterfactual condition like that.  For justification, Stephen Brusatte (U of Edinburgh) claims that there was a decrease in the number of plant-eating dinosaurs when the asteroid hit.  Pallab Ghosh at the BBC News reiterated that suggestion, claiming the extinction was a case of bad luck: “Dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact when they were at their most vulnerable, according to a new study.”  Seemingly opposite evidence was presented on PhysOrg, that says dinosaurs were doing just fine when the asteroid hit.  Herbivores were decreasing only in certain areas; “Overall, though, dinosaur species diversity appeared to be relatively stable despite the large-scale changes occurring over the last few million years.”  The article makes a point that most of the inferences about dinosaur diversity come from North American data, possibly skewing the interpretations.

Tanya Lewis at Live Science put the counterfactual this way: “Could dinosaurs have survived the impact that killed them?”  Don’t think, though, that she offers the possibility some did survive; she merely echoes Brusatte’s suggestion.  Noting that more delicate animals (like some birds) did survive the impact, though, Lewis has no further answer than sheer dumb luck.  “In fact, many birds did go extinct, so it may have been random,” she says as Brusatte’s idea.  “The truth is, scientists don’t know what made most dinosaurs so susceptible to extinction.”  Lewis then pivoted that ignorance into a sermon: humans had better not mess with diversity or climate!  “At any rate, the findings in North America suggest that ecosystems are deeply interconnected….” she concludes. “Perhaps that’s a lesson for humanity today, as human activities continue to threaten biodiversity.”  It’s hard to see how a random meteor strike 65 million years ago should make humans feel guilty today.

Meanwhile, Tia Ghose at Live Science interpreted seven T. rex tracks by three individuals as evidence that the monsters were not “lone wolves” as previously thought, but hunted in packs, even if they were not friendly to one another.  Whether they howled at the moon is another question.

Evolutionists have no answer to dinosaur extinction, even after decades of the most popular theory that a random impact did it.  Itsy bitsy caterpillars munching on tender leaves, metamorphosing into delicate butterflies, got by just fine, but the hugely diverse dinosaurs are all gone.  Remember that any explanation that depends on sheer dumb luck and random results is no explanation at all.  Why do we listen to these losers?  Any logical explanation should be viewed as superior to the Stuff Happens Law, but that’s the Darwinians’ stock answer to everything – from the big bang, to the solar system, to life and death.  Yet the culture worships these storytellers as the guardians of Knowledge.