Gould on Dinosaurs

Gould on Dinosaurs

Gould discussed three theories in his essay Sex, Drugs, Disaster and the extinction of dinosaurs. Out of these three theories two of them which are also being stated by Gould himself can be considered as a silly speculation. However, the last one is according to him one of the most influential and scientifically useful theories. These are as follows

Sex

According to the first theory, the testes work within a certain range of temperature. Within mammals the testis hangs out of the body. This is because the temperatures of the internal body are far high for the testes to work properly. During the overall rise of global temperature in the period or Cretaceous, the testes of dinosaurs were affected by the high temperature due to which their functionality was halted and caused a sterilization of the male dinosaurs which ultimately led to their extinction.

Drugs

Drugs were the second theory that was put forward. The drug was angiosperms that are flowering plants. These occurred during the last time of dinosaurs. The plants had psychoactive agents. In today's mammals these are avoided by their bitter taste. However, in case of the dinosaurs they did not have any taste and neither the livers of the dinosaurs were effective enough to detoxify the psychoactive agents in the plants and ultimately the dinosaur race came to an extinction due to the overdose of these plants.

Disasters

The third theory which can be considered as the most scientifically useful theory is the disaster through a large asteroid that removed the dinosaurs from the face of the planet. The asteroid hit the earth nearly 65 million years ago that created a dust cloud up in the sky so big and thick that it was capable enough to block the sunlight as well as the photosynthesis. The asteroid ...