Quote:
Originally Posted by Ericthebean
About the dinosaurs being extinct 66 million years ago, how do you know this? Were you there?
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I'll tackle your second question first:
How do you know dinosaurs ever existed? Were you there?
[I'm just illustrating how utterly absurd is the "Were you there?" demand in response to evidence which doesn't jibe with a conclusion someone wants to be true]
Now, on to your first question:
Because - as I wrote in the post you quoted, but completely ignored - we have untold tens of thousands of dinosaur fossils spanning over 160 millions years of Earth's history. Then, 66 million years ago, these fossils utterly stopped being laid down in the geologic record. Actually, what we see in the geologic record 66 million years BP is a mass extinction - the majority of species then in existence simply stopped being preserved in the fossil record. As it happens, we also have an enormous crater over 100 miles wide in what we now call the Yucatan, which we can date to 66 million years ago. We also have an anomalous layer of iridium found in many sites around the globe, which we can also date to 66 million years ago. Iridium is not common in the Earth's crust, but it is common in asteroids - which leave craters when they whack into Earth. Further, we have a global layer of soot that can also be dated to that time. Not only did the impact predictably thrust flaming rock into the sky in abundance, only to fall to Earth and create forest fires, but it also hurled great amounts of rock into unstable low-Earth-orbits, which decayed over the following months, whereupon the orbiting rocks were once again heated and started new fires upon impact. Toss in the dust in the atmosphere that would have dimmed the sun for years, and you have a planet that was pounded, burned, and then denied much of the life-giving sunlight upon which the global ecosystem rests. There could be no other result than a mass extinction event.
In addition to this, we have numerous other mass-extinction events in Earth's history, so this event is not unique and thus not unexpected.
Finally, subsequent to the K-Pg Event, we have an explosive diversity of those biological clades which did survive - precisely what one would expect to follow when entire classes of animals are suddenly removed from the ecosystem, leaving countless biological niches empty and waiting to be once again filled.
So, to sum up:
The model that the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago is supported by massive amounts of evidentiary data. It explains the abundant presence of dinosaur fossils pre-66MYA and the lack of dinosaur fossils since. The mechanism for that extinction is itself supported by considerable evidence.
That's how science works.
On the other hand, the idea that dinosaurs were around recently is supported by precisely one smidgen of data - ancient drawings and legends of things sort of like dinosaurs but also sort of like extant lizards and reptiles and humans (anthropomorphization), but inexplicable in light of 66 million years of dinosaur-fossil-free strata. And that small scrap of data is far, far, far more easily explained by the known existence of lizards and reptiles and the tendency of cultures to anthropomorphize animals, than by dinosaurs in the Holocene.
This is not hard.
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