Dinosaurs: Extinct or Natural Causes As geologic time goes, all the dinosaurs living on earth suddenly disappeared. How did these dominated and gigantic creatures really die? Was it a slow extinction through natural causes, or did it happen suddenly? These questions give rise to many different beliefs on how the dinosaurs disappeared over sixty-five million years ago. Something happened sixty-five million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period that was so devastating that it altered the course of life on earth.Extinction is easily defined: the birth rate fails to keep up with the death rate. However, the definition does not answer the question about the nature or causes of extinction. Since so many different causes of death of the dinosaur arose, paleontologists generally divide extinction into two main types. The first is called background extinction, or the isolated extinction of a species due to a variety of cause. Included in these background extinctions is out competition (the fight of the food), depletion of resources in a habitat, changes in climate, development or destruction of a mountain range, river channel migration, eruption of a volcano, the drying of a lake, or the destruction of a forest, grassland, or wetland habitat. The second type of extinction is called mass extinction. There are four main components: Large numbers species go extinct; many types of species go extinct; the effects are global; and the effects occur in a geologically short period of time (Encarta).The dinosaur could not have lived forever. No creature, plant, and bacteria are forever, not even Homo Sapiens. Extinction is the ultimate fate of all species. One theory on how the dinosaurs became extinct that of carbon dioxide, or the “greenhouse effect”. The eruption of volcanoes also proposed another theory. A massive eruption may have saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide so the that a sharp rise in temperature...
