Vinicio Coletti's idea about the extinction of dinosaurs

A new approach to a 65 million years old mistery

First published on February 1, 1999

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What we already know

Around 65 million years ago Earth was dominated by reptiles. Dinosaurs of many different species walked on the soil, while others lived into water or flew through the sky.
However, most species lived on the Earth's surface and there were herbivores as well as carnivores. This variety of animals clearly indicates that dinosaurs have been a very successful thread in the evolution of species.
Dinosaurs suddenly disappeared 65 million years ago and scientists are still looking for the reason of this evolutionary disaster.

Most popular theory is about a big asteroid collision with our planet. Nowadays astronomers are studying the so called NEO (Near Earth Orbit) objects and many of them can produce a global catastrophe in the unfortunate case of a collision.
The impact would produce a huge amount of heath, equivalent to thousands of very powerful thermonuclear bombs, and terrible winds. If the sea would be hit, gigantic waves would destroy life from all coast regions.
But the main impact would be on the short and mid term weather: dust (and perhaps also water vapor) would partially shield sunlight. As a result, climate would change dramatically all over the world. Animals living on the surface would suffer more than those living into the sea or underground.
That's exactly what scientists think to have happened to poor dinosaurs. A huge meteor crater in Mexico as well as the aboundance of iridium in the geological layers formed in that period, are normally considered evidences of this fact.

More facts

However there are other things to take into account. First of all, we don't know how sudden this death has been. From what I know, the time resolution cannot be so fine to tell if dinosaurs disappeared in ten years or one hundred or several thousand years.
The extinction is sudden from a geological point of view and, what is more important, a lot of species were interested by this phenomenon. In fact it is called a mass extinction.
So what we really know is that a great number of species disappeared in a period of some thousand years.
Another problem is about the dinosaurs metabolism. If they had not thermal regulation, their capabilities to adapt to a changing climate would have been very poor. If thermically regulated, like mammals are, they would react better. But even in this case, no species can survive too long if foods availability quickly changes.
Perhaps most dinosaurs were like nowadays reptiles, but recent discoveries showed that some species had the capability to accelerate metabolism on demand, pumping blood at a greater speed.
It's worth noting also that we certainly don't know all species that lived at that time, but only a very low fraction of them.

My proposal

Let's imagine something really different from current toughts.

As I said, the mass extinction lasted probably several thousand years or even more.
Dinosaurs disappeared about 65 million years ago, but they existed for more that 60 million years. Such reptiles were a successful evolutionary thread, able to produce very adapted animals.
Nowadays what's happening is a new, huge, mass extinction. Many species are disappearing, because of the spreading of human civilization.
Human beings are the result of another very successful evolutionary thread, that of mammals. According to different views, homo sapiens sapiens appeared from some hundred thousand years ago to some million years ago, as a result of a several dozen million years evolution of mammals.

thus

It's possibile that the very long evolution of dinosaurs produced at last a middle-sized, warm-blood (or the equivalent) intelligent being.
This creature founded perhaps a real civilization, that reached after some thousand years a technological level. Their population increased, as well as their use of natural resources and pollution, all resulting in the extinction of many species. Exactly like today.
Also, the development of the reptile civilization changed the Earth climate, leading to some kind of global disaster that closed that era. We can even think that the final event was a global thermonuclear war, producing the aboundance of iridium we found today.
In fact, since the evolution rules are always the same, there is no reason to think this intelligent reptiles weren't a bit aggressive or that they didn't fight for resources or were united in a single worldwide nation.
They had perhaps also their space exploration era and in this case we could perhaps a day find evidence of this ancient presence on the Moon or other planet with no atmosphere or anyway very slow geological changes.
And if really things went this way... what important lesson for us!
Our civilization would learn from the past history how to avoid that terrible ending.

Open questions

By the way there are several questions that must be answered to be sure that my ideas are not totally wrong. However, a satisfactory answer to all questions does not imply that this theory is necessarily true, but only that it can be proposed without many people laugh at it. After all, it could be really the asteroid...

Questions to be answered:

What could be found of a technological civilization after 65 million years? In that period continents have moved, climate has changed several times, ocean level went up and down, etc. What about a so ancient town? Or artifacts of that period?
The satisfactory answer would be: we could find nothing of that period (and in fact we found nothing), although I think that researchs focused on this aspect have never been done.
Suggested research: to get ancient athmosphere samples trapped in amber or elsewhere, looking for molecules or dust particles of artificial origin like the ones our civilization produces today.
Would a global thermonuclear war produce a uniform, although thin, iridium layer? By the way not immediately, because radioactive elements decay. So would we find iridium after 65 million years of decay? (I know many isotopes ends in Pb, but I wish to know more about)
Satisfactory answer would be of course: yes, we would find it, although the iridium could come from other sources, for example from some kind of widespread industry or energy-producing process.
Pictures drawn on very ancient rocks are really so old, as some strange books state? This is not a very important question, because I don't like to mix with such a quite fictionary world, but... if true it would help a lot. It could be the last messages of a dying civilization (or the equivalent of our prehistoric drawings).

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