If it killed the dinos, why are we still here?

I’ve been married for nearly 25 years and I know this subject, in general, is taboo. But the topic appears to have fallen into the realm of science now and judging by history it may indeed come back to haunt us, lest we forget.

It seems British scientists now believe dinosaur extinction may have occurred due to, well, gas. Apparently, these researchers calculated that these prehistoric-pooters may have in fact been the cause of their own demise. Not an asteroid; not severe cold; and certainly not a volcano. No sir, nothing like that at all. Simply put, the dinos ate a bunch of plants, in particular the sauropoots (sic), and that resulted in too much methane for their own survival. At least, that’s what two British scientists calculate.

Citing statistics that sound more like Monty Python than Isaac Newton, Professors Grameme Ruxton and David Wilkinson calculate these gaseous mastodons of the Mesozoic age spewed more than 520 million tons of methane per year.  That, they say, “is enough to warm the planet and hasten their own demise.”

Before this incredible discovery, everyone knew extinction was caused by an asteroid strike and volcanic activity around 65 million years ago.  For me, all this time I’ve chosen to believe what Al Gore has been saying about global warming and how all those gas emissions were going to end up being the death of us all.

Well, I guess that theory is gone with the wind since here we have living proof that gas can in fact cause death. If it can get the dinosaurs, it certainly can get us. And, I guess it doesn’t matter whether the fumes come from trains, planes and automobiles, or just a variety of prehistoric wind bags.

I think it was Socrates who said, “Dead is dead, and it pretty much doesn’t matter how you get there.” Except that he said it in Greek, which looks like this, “Οι νεκροί είναι νεκροί, και λίγο πολύ δεν πειράζει πώς φθάνετε εκεί,” and makes it sound a lot more profound.  But I never really cared much for translations personally.

Anyway, back to the end of the dinosaurs.

I would think that killing off all the dinosaurs in the world would be quite a feat for any kind of gas passers. Even today’s most offensive SUVs would be hard pressed to match the amount of methane produced by a dinosaur, apparently. And even the noxious fumes produced in Men’s Rooms everywhere would have a hard time accumulating up to 520 million pounds per year. In truth, the British scientists ran tests in the Parliament potties, and found they generated merely 110 million pounds of methane yearly, much less than can be found on the Parliamentary floor where it was impossible to measure with anything other than olfactory sensors.  In fact, they found a very similar result in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. They have not as yet received permission to test the Executive branch and are currently being held in contempt by the Judiciary merely for asking.

Still, it’s kind of hard to believe that such might be the cause behind these massive extinctions. It’s much easier to believe that such a calamity came about due to an asteroid or some volcano. It hasn’t been that long since Mount St. Helen’s gave us a bird’s eye view of just what a volcano might do, and believe me that thing belched plenty of matter, gas, and ash.  And the Russian’s have shown how devastating an asteroid strike can be in all those reports about Tunguska.

So to think that the truth might be as simple as Ruxton and Wilkinson have made it out to be doesn’t really pass the sniff test, so to speak.  One thing we do know for sure:  the dinosaurs, as we know them from the ossuary records, got it in the end.