Did the dinosaurs die of a virus?

Answer 1

Disease has also been proposed as the killer of the dinosaurs. As the cretaceous period went on, more and more land bridges started to appear on the earth. The oceans started to dry up and the dinosaurs that were there were able to walk across the land that was there. As the dinosaurs searched for food they would walk over these new land bridges and find relatives of theirs from when the lands of the world were one. But land bridges brought more than dinosaurs looking for food into the new land. They brought all of the diseases that those dinosaurs had inside of them. The diseases did not hurt the dinosaurs because they were immune to them, but to the other dinosaurs they could be fatal and the other way around. In most cases disease in a species in not fatal and is a positive thing because it will wipe out the weak so only the strong survive to pass their genes on to the next generation, but in the dinosaurs case it might not have been that way.

Answer 2

No. The leading theories involve an asteroid impact, a massive series of volcanic eruptions in India, or a series of cataclysms that occurred in a short period. A virus is an unlikely candidate as a very wide variety of life, not just dinosaurs, was wiped out at this time.

Answer 3

It is widely believed that it is the most likely cause of their extinction. A meteor strike would have caused large scale environmental damage.

However that is only one of many theories. We can't actually prove what killed off the dinosaurs. See the related question below.

Answer 4

There are several theories for the disappearance of dinosaurs:

• Some scientists believe the dinosaurs died because a volcano erupted.
• Others believe that an asteroid fell to the Earth and changed the weather climate and the dinosaurs died of the heat.
• Some dinosaurs died in the Ice Age because of the sudden weather change and couldn't adapt.
• There is some thought that isolated populations of dinosaurs may have developed resistance to viruses and diseases that other populations were not immune to. If the two populations encounterd each other the result could have been an epidemic. This is similar to Europeans bringing smallpox to the New World.

Answer 5

This is one of the many theories.

We don't know how they died for sure.

See the related question below.

Answer 6

There are many diseas and beliefs about it but nobody knows