Jan 7, 2008 12:41pm

Killer Bees Wiped Out Dinosaurs!

Well, almost.  There’s a new book, written by the husband-wife team of George and Roberta Poinar, that says the last dinosaurs may have been killed off by biting insects — not simply, as prevailing theory has had it, by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago. The Poinars argue that the Cretaceous dinosaurs did not die off instantly, as one might expect if there had been a catastrophe such as global dust from an impact, so it’s time to look for additional explanations. Their favorite: that primitive mosquitoes, mites and ticks spread disease; and early bees promoted the spread of flowering plants, crowding out the flora on which plant-eating dinosaurs would have fed. The book is called "What Bugged The Dinosaurs? Insects, Disease And Death In The Cretaceous" (Princeton University Press) and it’s getting a fair amount of play in British and Australian media today; take a look at The Independent from London and The Sydney Morning Herald.  The Poinar name may be familiar–some of their past work, on insects preserved (with their DNA) in amber, was an inspiration for "Jurassic Park."  George Poinar has an appointment at Oregon State University; Roberta is retired from teaching. Daniel Cressey, writing on "The Great Beyond" blog at Nature.com, says, "There might be some merit to Poinar’s ideas."  But he worries about some "fairly extravagant claims not tested by peer review." He writes, "If dinosaurs couldn’t adapt to the changing conditions and the rise of insect/disease vectors why could other animals? Could biting insects even get through thick dinosaur skin? Why does no one mention peer-reviewed criticism of work including Poinar’s that any journalist could have picked up with a google search?" Demise of the least fit?  Since a lot of you have been weighing in on evolution over the weekend, this may be fresh fodder. 

User Comments

Ridiculous theory!!!!

Posted by: Truth | January 7, 2008, 3:08 pm 3:08 pm

Dinosaurs were hunted by alien predators! Didn’t you see AVP? :)

Posted by: Gerald | January 7, 2008, 3:26 pm 3:26 pm

Dinosaurs died becuase it was their time to die.

Posted by: Greg | January 7, 2008, 3:31 pm 3:31 pm

I’m voting for Mickey Mouse.

Posted by: Joseph | January 7, 2008, 3:40 pm 3:40 pm

Its good to read about alternate theories because I believe the fossil records do not back up the extinction of the dinosaurs. Many of them were still kicking a long time after the meteorite. It was always an interesting discussion with the herpetologists I knew who payed attention to lizard fossils.

Posted by: KF | January 7, 2008, 3:42 pm 3:42 pm

Like most species, they probably died out for a number of reasons that all added up to population declines. This theory could have contributed along with the impact. It would be very rare for a species to go extinct due to just one cause.

Posted by: jock59801 | January 7, 2008, 3:43 pm 3:43 pm

If insects wipe out anything, it will be humankind.

Posted by: godseyesore | January 7, 2008, 3:45 pm 3:45 pm

Global warming killed them off. Oil companies, those dinosaur killing greedy ########!

Posted by: numbnut | January 7, 2008, 3:53 pm 3:53 pm

Dinosaurs died because they were immoral. It was their own fault. Stop playing the dinosaur/victim card.

Posted by: Red-stater | January 7, 2008, 3:56 pm 3:56 pm

Oh come on. Doesn’t everybody know that the dinosaurs were killed off when the “Big Flood” hit and Noah couldn’t fit them on the arc because they are too big and mean! Sheesh people.

Posted by: BigT | January 7, 2008, 4:01 pm 4:01 pm

Hello there! This story was great! Also very interesting. I might even go and by the book too! Keep stories like these comming! I love to hear about dinosaurs! Take Care. Bye.

Posted by: Becca Hartman | January 7, 2008, 4:24 pm 4:24 pm

Probably not, we all know that there are endangered and extinct animals. For all we know they were endangered, and there could be THOUSANDS of explinations for that.
[[they could have killed one another]]
who knows.

Posted by: Sara | January 7, 2008, 4:25 pm 4:25 pm

Yes, that’s it – the dinos killed each other off. Interspecies gang warfare. Dinos invading each other’s territory for resources or on false pretexts that the others had WMDs. Maybe bad health care and crooked insurance companies run by velociraptors.

Posted by: kentlee7 | January 7, 2008, 4:51 pm 4:51 pm

If that were the case there would be more evidence of the prevailing Cretaceous insects in the crust layer as the dinosaur found. Assuming mosquitoes were more or less the same biologic makeup as todays mosquitoes, then they would have been seeking warm-blooded creatures to feed upon (assuming they fed on blood). As yet, there is no proof that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. I would guess it would have to be a major grandscale on-slaught of mites,sqitters,and bees, oh my. I believe the other theory has more credence. Sorry.

Posted by: lvbkz | January 7, 2008, 5:00 pm 5:00 pm

And by the way, there is evidence dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

Posted by: sss | January 7, 2008, 5:31 pm 5:31 pm

According to the Bush report, they were killed by Al-Qaeda

Posted by: Icefairy | January 7, 2008, 5:35 pm 5:35 pm

It was probably due to global warming. According to Star Trek, there was a race of intelligent dinosaurs who eventually discovered warp speed before they were destroyed. I suspect they drove SUVs also; really big ones! That’s why we have an oil shortage today.

Posted by: michael charlton | January 7, 2008, 5:41 pm 5:41 pm

Funny, what some people take as gospel truth (i.e., human-induced global warming and the THEORY of evolution) are still and all actually just theories, not law. They are subject to change and revision when more science and evidence are discovered. For years, evidence seemed to support the theory that dinosaurs were killed off by a massive meteorite. Now this…Bottom Line? Keep the mind open. P.S. And for the record I do subscribe to the theory of evolution.

Posted by: Jerryemt2001 | January 7, 2008, 6:57 pm 6:57 pm

I can’t believe this!! Somthing that we now swat killed the dinosaures

Posted by: akaz | January 7, 2008, 7:05 pm 7:05 pm

Perhaps the human race itself could use some mosquitoe-based herd thinning. I hear malaria can give quit a buzz. Perhaps dinosaur tastes really good with A-1 sauce, and we could blame Arbies. But seriously, I think they starved to death because they stopped getting their welfare checks, and they hadn’t evolved far enough to understand cause & effect (work & eating). Or it could have been the lack of faith-based soup kitchens. After the terrorist mammalian rodent-like creatures killed all of the dino politicians, no one was around to allocate funds for disaster relief.
I think this article is intended to just get a few folks bantering, it’s not a big story and..well..I have better things to do than worry about what dinosaurs died of – or how some dude is trying to get his name in lights. Locally (in AZ) there’s a “professor” that was pushing to introduce elephants back into the desert since mammoths lived here long ago (but before it was a desert). Well, he got his name in lights, and then laughed out of town by his peers.

Posted by: Ken | January 7, 2008, 9:45 pm 9:45 pm

Wow. These are some of the most ignorant comments I’ve seen here. All I can say is, wow.
Anyway, it’s an intersesting way to look at it. I’ve always thought it was the asteroid or comet that impacted, creating the Chixulub crater on the Yucatan, accompanied by an increase in global volcanism. All of which have been proven by the way. This may be plausable, without plentifull food, they’d be weakened, easier disease transmission.

Posted by: Lawrence | January 8, 2008, 8:45 am 8:45 am

Theories such as this always remind me of the great debates historians have had about what was THE cause of the decline of the Roman Empire. Causality being what it is, there are usually many factors contributing to some occurrence, not just one. But the concept IS intriguing–it sounds like an old Irwin Allen movie!

Posted by: chuck | January 8, 2008, 3:46 pm 3:46 pm

Seems to me that without peer review, one could claim the Flying Spaghetti Monster decided to end the reign of the dinosaurs. In any major climactic event – such as a meteor hit – there will be pockets of survivors who can hang on for a very long time. But the habitat around them is going to change and eventually (in a geologically short span of time) their habitat is going to change too much to adapt to and the last survivors will die off. Further, if the gene pool is too small, inbreeding will eventually get those that habitat change doesn’t. A number of factors can impact a species at once, all triggered by a single event. Whether nailed in the blast and immediate after-effects of a meteor strike, bugged to death, or starved by habitat loss or dummied down by inbreeding, the most likely cause for all of these events was the initial meteor impact event.

Posted by: fatesrider | January 8, 2008, 4:36 pm 4:36 pm

I cannot stand these stupid unfounded theories… a huge waste of time & money that should have been spent on something more relevant, like cures for diseases etc…

Posted by: moosedog66 | January 8, 2008, 6:04 pm 6:04 pm

sigh…

Posted by: neil | January 9, 2008, 1:05 am 1:05 am

Let’s say that the authors are thinking out of the box and the hypothesis is not yet proved. They need to look for supporting evidence and let their peers look at it. It could be true.

Posted by: 3what3 | January 9, 2008, 1:55 am 1:55 am

fatesrider
Flying Spaghetti Monster? No way! It had to be it’s Mesozoic ancestor the Crawling Spaghetti Monster because the Splashing Spaghetti Monster had already gone extinct.

Posted by: Ed | January 9, 2008, 3:47 pm 3:47 pm

My hypothesis is that an asteroid hit the Yucatan and the energy from the impact caused the weak spot on the opposite side of the globe which then over the years bulged, gave out and became the Deccan Traps causing major changes in the atmosphere and major climatic change. From the depth and strength of dinosaur skin found on Psittacosaurus in China I really need to question mosquitoes but I’m open minded enough to wait until I can read up on this bug hypothesis. It does beat the Crawling Spaghetti Monster hypothesis.

Posted by: Ed | January 9, 2008, 3:57 pm 3:57 pm

heyyyy ilove beau

Posted by: dan | January 11, 2008, 11:15 am 11:15 am

KF
I have heard that claim (dinos lived abouve the KT boundary) before but I have yet to see a paper either for or against. What evidence is proposed, fossil or trace?

Posted by: Ed | January 11, 2008, 6:44 pm 6:44 pm

Icefairy
Don’t be silly, the Al-Qaeda’s forerunners did it: the Chi-Qaeda.

Posted by: Ed | January 11, 2008, 6:48 pm 6:48 pm

the people on nibiru exterminated the dinos to make it possible for them to live here. seeing they are also our creators, they made it possible for us to live our daily lives without becoming the main course or, in the case of david beckam, dessert.

Posted by: terri | January 13, 2008, 7:03 pm 7:03 pm

“If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research” -A. Einstein

Posted by: crbartist | January 21, 2008, 4:09 pm 4:09 pm

everything that sorround us is fisical, wich at the same time is the interaction we need to manifest, if people is interesting in the enigmatic dissapearence of the dinos in general, they will definitively have to develope the rest of the percentage of the brain and not trying to find out only with 10% of the thinking matter.
Even in this page you could notice the high level of ignorance interpretated through the nonsense emails that had been sent to this respectable and serious website; now tell me, are this people serious?, or theres children playing with their parents pc when they are at work?.
right now due to that unfortunate case of human ignorance the only fisical excistance capable of explaining such curiosities about this constant earthly incidents; are the extraterrestial scientific community, yes the ones at charge of our evolutionary cicles in this small and insignificant plane on the never ending nothingness.
But even them are carefully trying to understand their levels of creations and they also having a hard time dealing with it such as “us in many cases of observation and sad and slow process of tryin to make it perfect, theres levels of interaction but they cant interfiere directly so thats why they have what we would describe as (workers for one universal cause).
AND tryin to understand our ways they have come out of their norm, because we have become high mantenace and a little more out of control, the dinos were far more easy to deal with simply cuz they didnt posses self awareness in a intelligent level, so now is like and outbreak of a “biological virus” meaning us and being hard to contain, like our selfs playing with ebola, antrax, and even nuclear tech, ignoring that all we doing is spreading means of destructing lving things as we tamper with our selfs, but is nothing less than their own primitive interactions passed on to us when we were created with the help of their biological interfirience after eons of experimenting with biological means to create living and intelligently interacting biological entities, thats were we came from, and thats why dinos had to be erradicated because they eventually found how to create us, but never the less we are trully just another biological experiment gone wrong, and now theyre looking for a easy and quiet way of getting rid of us without looking like savages that give life and take it as they please, like they have done before.
But this time they re trying to warn
us cuz unlike their prior creations we are thinking and we also have a soul and they dont want to bring our doom in the wrong way, so the spiritual realm dont sanction them for their wrong doing, but even so depite the fact of that spiritual law, there will be always someone obsses to disobey due to their points of view against the rules of our creation and the way we got to be handle, nibiru is just one of their methods to make it look natural and out of their hands but theres many other ways, but like the juditial system we posses is blindly controled.
The only think we could do as a primitive still form of life is sit there and go with the flow, cuz in the end we are just sadly to say spendable guinapigs for the extraterrestial scientific community on the fisical realm of excistance, nothing to worry about cuz we are forever and at some point in this eternal interaction well be doing the same once we reach enlightment like they once did and then it will be passed on to us to continue the never endind sad and slow process of creation and destruction.

Posted by: Greg | March 28, 2008, 11:27 am 11:27 am

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