Dinosaurs rapidly became extinct about 65 million years ago as part of a mass extinction known as the K-T event, because it is associated with a geological signature known as the K-T boundary, usually a thin band of sedimentation found in various parts of the world (K is the traditional abbreviation for the Cretaceous, derived from the German name Kreidezeit). [■]Many explanations have been proposed for why dinosaurs became extinct. [■]For example, some have blamed dinosaur extinction on the development of flowering plants, which were supposedly more difficult to digest and could have caused constipation or indigestion - except that flowering plants first evolved in the Early Cretaceous, about 60 million years before the dinosaurs died out. [■]In fact, several scientists have suggested that the duckbill dinosaurs and horned dinosaurs, with their complex battery of grinding teeth, evolved to exploit this new resource of rapidly growing flowering plants. [■]Others have blamed extinction on competition from the mammals, which allegedly ate all the dinosaur eggs—except that mammals and dinosaurs appeared at the same time in the Late Triassic, about 190 million years ago, and there is no reason to believe that mammals suddenly acquired a taste for dinosaur eggs after 120 million years of coexistence. Some explanations (such as the one stating that dinosaurs all died of diseases) fail because there is no way to scientifically test them, and they cannot move beyond the realm of speculation and guesswork.Some explanations seem plausible until the facts are considered..
