The death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is one of the planet's great mysteries, and a number of theories have been suggested. For example, the cartoonist Gary Larson pinned the disaster on dinosaurs smoking. Oh, he is a wag! In reality, of course, the dinosaurs didn't have any pockets in which to carry lighters or matches.
In recent years, the most popular theory has posited that Earth was hit by a giant meteor. This event led to general calamity -- the climate changed and dinosaurs had to change their vacation plans, leading to widespread demoralization in dinosaur ranks, especially as the females naturally blamed their mates and went into an epoch-lasting sulk that was not conducive to breeding.
But the Science section of The New York Times recently reported a new theory, or at least a variation of the old. Instead of one blockbuster meteor, "killer objects from outer space may have sometimes arrived in pairs or even swarms."
To my mind, whether it was one meteor or many that bombarded the poor dinosaurs into extinction, the basic theory doesn't ring true. As an element in the unfolding story of the Earth, it is a bit deus ex machina. (Not the name of a rock band, as you may suppose because it would be a good one, but "any unconvincing character or event brought artificially into the plot of a story or drama to settle an involved situation.")
To be sure, the Almighty reportedly sent a Flood upon the Earth to punish people, but that would make meteors killing the dinosaurs a sort of divine warm-up act, and I just don't buy it.
Besides, if meteors destroyed the dinosaurs, what lesson can mankind draw from this (other than the need for specially reinforced umbrellas)? After all, we are the heirs of the great lizards upon the Earth, as a cursory glance at the halls of Congress will confirm.
It is daring of me to suggest another theory for the demise of the dinosaurs, being unencumbered by scientific knowledge as I am and working in the same city as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, with its great collection of specimens and its proud history of research.
Sometimes, though, it takes an ignorant outsider to look at something in a new light that would not be obvious to anybody educated and sensible.
That is why, instead of looking to the distant past for answers, as so many scientists do, my theories involve looking at the present and what threatens the extinction of humankind, and then using that knowledge and reapplying it to the fate of the dinosaurs.
As I look at the dinosaurs, I see startling parallels with what is going on in our own time.
Consider the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the most fearsome of carnivores. With its salivating mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, it would fall upon its prey and rip it limb to limb in an awesome display of brute power and bad table manners. If it were alive today, it could be a commentator on Fox News.
Consider also the brontosaurus, entirely a different kind of creature. It was also huge but so slow and plodding you might think it worked for the government. Using its long neck, it grazed peacefully on vegetation.
What we have here with the T. Rex and the brontosaurus are the respective adherents of the Atkins diet (meat, meat and more meat) and any number of no-fat diets (salads and vegetables and things that taste like bark). Clearly, these dinosaurs had body issues and, in their desperate self-consciousness, had turned to dieting.
As we know from human experience, dieting is a sure way of becoming crabby, so it wouldn't take a meteor to make the females averse to a little romantic cuddling.
Of course, not all the dinosaurs were huge. Some were very small. And you know how they felt about that? Lousy, of course. In the Cretaceous period, society's image of a well-evolved dinosaur was this great lizard, and if you were a puny lizard, you felt miserable.
The truth is that the dinosaurs -- large and small -- lacked self-esteem, which we now recognize as essential to survival (I say this despite never having had any self-esteem myself). Worse yet, the dinosaurs did not have support groups for those lacking self-esteem (they did for a while but the T. Rex kept eating the participants).
So the dinosaurs perished from the Earth. Although there's no need to thank me for figuring out why, the Nobel Prize committee may contact me through the listing below.
Reg Henry can be reached at rhenry@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1668.
E-mail this story 
