...which is not mine. I still have to go with the "very large in the middle, and tapering off to be much smaller at each end" theory myself. No, this is a new theory about why they went extinct. They were sleep deprived.

Sounds like a load of untestable crap to me. The dinosaurs were doing quite well right up to the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary, where lots of other varieties of life (including many kinds that don't have any brains at all) suddenly went extinct.

As I said, Paul, the theory isn't mine...

I've been more sleep-deprived than any dinosaur, and I'm not extinct.

I dunno about the original study, but the article is definitely a load of crap, for one simple reason: it gets the relationship between the various land vertebrates completely, totally, and absolutely wrong. Dinosaurs are not the ancestors of reptiles. Modern reptiles lie on a substantially different evolutionary path from dinosaurs; the last common ancestor for the two clades is somewhere around two hundred fifty million years old. Evolutionarily, dinosaurs are much, much closer to living birds than they are to living reptiles.

What a load of baloney. Everybody knows that the earth is only 6000 years old!

Sleep-deprived? Well, that would explain why they all took up smoking cigarettes. Bad judgment.

</Gary Larson reference>

Don't care how they died, I believe the the global catastrophe theory myself, be it a big volcano, or an asteroid more than anything else myself.

I care about this. "when dinosaurs ruled the earth" is a COMMON! term, though it has lost it's flavor. A friend of mine introduced me, when I was 14, to a semantic distinction. "The dinosaurs never ruled the earth, they WALKED the Earth" It's especially poignant since he is now a communist greenie, but still.

Dinosaurs were never an important thing on the planet, other than various predators of large size, in all likelihood the large lizards were not dominant predators, but herbivores proffiting off of an unnusually warm environment creating a large rainforest consisting of continents and large shared water systems creating vast marine foodstuffs to feed them. The dinosaurs, in all likelihood served FIT life by being centralized foodstuffs.

This is a spoof, right?

Dinosaurs were never an important thing on the planet, other than various predators of large size, in all likelihood the large lizards were not dominant predators, but herbivores proffiting off of an unnusually warm environment creating a large rainforest consisting of continents and large shared water systems creating vast marine foodstuffs to feed them. The dinosaurs, in all likelihood served FIT life by being centralized foodstuffs.

Those conditions lasted almost 200 million years. What's "unusual" about that? And frankly, large herbivores and carnivores have always been important parts of the ecosystem. They redistribute nutrients and spread undigested plant seeds. They support a lot of parasites, etc.

For example, if there were apatosaurs roaming the Amazon jungle, say at most a few hundred to a few thousand (depending how big they got), that would radically change the entire basin since have an herbivore that can weigh up to a few dozen tons can really clean out the canopy.