Why are scientists so deadset on a cataclysmic disaster killing the dinosaurs? Couldn't they just have evolved into modern day birds?
by 
juk
ANSWERS: 16
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Actually, there is some evidence, that birds are directly related to dinosaurs. This is a good point you bring up. Very interesting. Thanks for the thought stimulating question!
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thats a good point, i believe there are fossils of the in between stage, reptiles with feathers.
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Until the early 1980s it was something of a mystery how the dinosaurs died out -- along with mass extinctions of many species at the end of the Cretaceous some 65 million years ago. Was is a sudden change in climate? A series of volcanic events? Nobody knew. Then they discovered a thin layer of iridium -- a rare earth element more typically found in asteroids than in the earth's crust -- in the sediments worldwide at around 65 million years old -- the so-called K-T boundary. Aha! Increased volcanism (rather than asteroid impact) has not been ruled out as the cause of the extinctions. What we know for sure is that all the non-birdlike dinosaurs vanished suddenly at the same time at the K-T boundary. Why are scientists so dead set? EVIDENCE of course!!
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The best example would be what ever that place in Wyoming. So many dinosaurs, apparently dead all at once.
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Yes, there is some evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds. However, this does not explain why the dinosaurs (along with many other species both on land and in the oceans) just suddenly disappear from the record at that time. The evidence supports the idea that something pretty cataclysmic did happen about 65 million years ago that did cause a mass extinction event. There is now some controversy as to whether the asteroid that hit about then was actually big enough to do it. Some are proposing that it was a sudden increase in volcanic activity. Some are proposing that it may have been a combination of these things. Whatever it was, all of these different life forms just suddenly disappeared and only those could adapt to the new conditions survived. The number of species that just disappeared (not just dinosaurs) indicates that something pretty cataclysmic did occur.
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Evolution is a process of adaptation to change in the environment. Dinosaurs were already undergoing the process of evolving feathered wings by the time the extinction event in question occurred. It turned out that the feather-adapted dinosaurs, which tended to be smaller than the epic-sized dinosaurs, were better able to cope with the changing environment and thus, they survived and were able to sub-adapt...give this process a few million years and you get birds.
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Birds are dinosaurs.
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More and more it is looking as though birds are descended from dinosaurs.
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Maybe they devolved! Maybe they failed to adapt to their environment! Maybe that's why they aren't alive with the exception of gaters and turtles and frogs any longer!
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The first time I heard the ostriches that live behind my house, I could've sworn there were dinosaurs back there.
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Because they suddenly disappeared from the fossil record, where in the strata for earlier ages there had been multitudes of their remains. It's clear from the evidence that the dinosaurs disappeared quite suddenly, perhaps in one cataclysmic event or perhaps in a number of smaller extinctions. It does seem that birds, as well as other reptiles which persist to this day, are either descended or distantly related to the dinosaurs. But that doesn't explain what became of the dinosaurs themselves. When whatever extinction events occurred, all of the large creatures died and the smaller, more adaptive ones persisted. So it's not really an either/or situation, there was some combination of both things happening.
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A few of them did evolve into birds, but the rest all died out about 65 million years ago.
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All the evidence points to it. The high level of Iridium, which is usually only found in meteors. The sudden halt of the fossils et cetera.
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NO cuz evolution isnt real.
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Actually, I think the theory is that both happened -- That something killed off most of the dinosaurs and the ones that remained have evolved into birds over the several million years since.
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Maybe that's really what killed the dinosaurs--they tried to fly.
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