Back in elementary school we were all taught that long ago when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, an asteroid hit which blasted dust and debris into the atmosphere sparking global climate change and eventually over hundreds of years, the dinosaurs could no longer withstand the conditions and all died out. Wrong! One of the most common stories of our youth that we all learned is false, the truth is much more dramatic than that. I wont get into too much of the science, if you want to listen to the story I will leave that up to you. But here are the basics of the new theory on how the dinosaurs went extinct. The culprit was the asteroid alright, but the dinosaurs did not die out due to global climate change, their death was about as sudden and painful as it gets. When the asteroid hit the earth it blasted debris into the atmosphere that the earths gravity eventually pulled back down. This super-heated debris became little glass bullets that rained down all over the entire surface of earth, all the while burning up in our atmosphere. This heated up the sky to the point that it turned red, and the entire surface of the planet was baked by the intense heat of burning little trails from these glass balls. Every last dinosaur was killed in a matter of hours as their blood in their bodies began to boil. The only survivors were swimming deep in the ocean or had burrowed underground. When it was all over, our ancestors, the mammals, emerged to witness a dinosaur graveyard.
So why am I telling you all this? Well, for one, I think it is really cool! And I was surprised to hear about how few people actually know of this new theory of the extinction of the dinos. It just goes to show that with so much information out there, it is easy to miss new stories and discoveries that don't always make it into our own personal bubbles.
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