Do you ever get the feeling that the scientists are making it up as they go?

Headline Reuters: Day from Hell May Have Killed Off Dinosaurs

Challenging conventional theory, new scientific research suggests the dinosaurs may have been scorched into extinction by an asteroid collision 65 million years ago that unleashed 10 billion times more power than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.

Earth’s temperatures soared, the sky turned red and trees all over the planet burst into flames, said atmospheric physicist Brian Toon of the University of Colorado….

“Essentially, if you were exposed you were broiled alive. That is probably what happened to the dinosaurs. They were big creatures that didn’t have anywhere to hide,” said Toon.

It is a novel new theory, but it contradicts the older, established theory that dates all the way back to last century.

Despite opposition from some scientists, the idea that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid that slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula has won general acceptance since it was first mooted in the early 1990s.

Under that argument, academics say the giant reptiles mostly froze or starved to death when a huge cloud of particles kicked up by the meteorite blocked the world’s sunlight for months.

But many people are working on new ideas on why the dinosaurs died. It’s a whole industry. After all, that’s what Ph. D. are made of, you know.

A theory gaining ground is that global warming combined with another asteroid collision in an unknown location other than the Yucatan was what cut short the dinosaurs’ reign….

Global warming caused by 400,000 years of repeated volcanic eruptions in western India weakened the dinosaurs and then another asteroid struck earth, although scientists have yet to find its crater, Keller said.

“It’s a double whammy at that point,” she said.

A combination of the two disasters deprived the Earth of oxygen and the dinosaurs probably suffocated to death, she said.

And what a politically correct double whammy at that. Global warming killed the dinosaurs! Who would have thought of it. Back in the ’70s, the big environmental ‘threat’ was pollution caused ice age, and so back then the dinosaurs died from global cooling. Now that the politically cool environmental threat is ‘global warming’, it makes sense that the dinosaurs now died from that.

So, in one article, Dinosaurs either died from an ice age caused by an asteroid that hit the earth. Or they were incinerated by an asteroid that hit the earth. Or they suffocated from global warming and an unknown asteroid that hit the earth.

But, since what is true is what is taught in school, we have the definitive answer.

The academics are unlikely to agree soon on what caused the demise of the Triceratops, Sauropods and their kin but in the jungly Yucatan peninsula, locals are in no doubt.

“Everyone knows that the asteroid here killed the dinosaurs. They teach it in the schools,” said Isabel Lopez, a shop owner in the village of Yaxcopoil.

If they teach it, it must be true.

By that proof, the theory of evolution is true. After all, they teach it in school.

One theory they didn’t mention in the article: Maybe the dinosaurs died from a lot of rain. Now that would be a novel idea.