Friday 2 October 2015

Palaeontology 101

I'm not saying that LittleBear and I have read a lot of books on dinosaurs or the oceans, but today he enacted a saw shark explaining to a parrot fish what happened 65 million years ago...

"Don't worry, there aren't any dinosaurs now, they all died out in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. The volcanoes exploded and made an ash cloud that filled the atmosphere, and a big fire ball went round the whole world, and the ash blocked out the sun so the plants couldn't do photosynthesis and the trees and bushes died. And so the herbivores didn't have anything to eat, because there were no plants.  And the carnivores didn't have anything to eat when the herbivores died out. And a really, really big meteorite hit the earth as well and it put lots of dust into the air, that blocked out the sun as well. And the meteorites hit the dinosaurs on the heads and bodies and killed them, and some of the dinosaurs fell into cracks in the ground."

(The bits about being hit by pieces of meteorite and falling into cracks in the ground are definitely interpreted from the rather lurid illustrations that seem to go with descriptions of the kt extinction in children's books)

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