As a kid, I was taught that dinosaurs, who lived millions of years ago, were wiped out by a huge asteroid that struck the earth, creating a cloud of ash that blocked out the sun and resulted in a mass die-off of both plants and animals. Of course, that was not the first, and certainly not the last, in a long line of theories put forward to explain the absence dinosaurs today. Some claim that the most likely culprit was the eruption of a supervolcano or a series of eruptions of volcanoes that produced that same kind of cloud of ash. Others prefer to blame the more generic killer “climate change.” Still others have proposed that disease killed off the giant lizards.
I think my favorite theory by far is what I’ll call the “flatulence theory.” It is by no means a new theory, but it has made its way into the news via a new study in which it is claimed that dinosaurs produced enough methane to change the entire climate of the earth, leading to their own extinction. You can read about it here.
What I take away from all of this is that after multiple theories and complex models, scientists don’t really know why the dinosaurs disappeared. Rest assured, tomorrow a new theory will be proposed or an old one recycled. I’d just like to add one comment to the whole discussion: maybe it was a giant flood that killed them all (Genesis 6-8). It’s at least more plausible than death by flatulence, attested to by nearly every ancient culture in the world, and taught by God’s Word.
