we humans believe that we are masters of our own fate in reality we are but Pawns in The Game of Life the previous rulers of our planet the dinosaurs reigned for 150 million years but even they were finally overthrown whatever cause their Extinction May Herald the end of days for our civilization did Armageddon arrived in a shocking instant it is like trillions upon trillions of meteors hitting the atmosphere all at the same time you would have a poison gas cloud that would spread over the land certainly within 3 months I'm sure every dinosaur on the planet was dead or was it a long slow death in a perilous and merciless world the dinosaurs were doomed whether or not there was an asteroid hitting the Earth the dinosaurs would have essentially been sitting ducks it's almost as though dinosaurs were being set up for failure the answer leads to a stunning conclusion we have no evidence that any single dinosaur lived long enough to be whacked by the meteorite none this you should find deeply disturbing what you think you know about what caused dinosaur extinction is not the whole story reality is much scarier past is prologue the ultimate Destiny of mankind reveals itself in the history of the first [Music] apocalypse 65 million years ago dinosaurs dominate the planet if man were alive he would be prey rather than [Music] Predator but severe changes are battering the global environment they're provoking the natural forces of evolution helping to knock the dinosaurs from Power their Extinction is just weeks away this Tyrannosaurus Rex the last of his kind will die a mass killing is underway on a scale that our world hasn't seen C by the time it is over no creature weighing more than 50 lb will survive in the oceans a wide range of marine organisms ceases to exist when the horror finally ends more than half of all the diversity of life on the planet will be extinguished most famously no dinosaurs Will Survive not even the mighty T-Rex these were horrendous creatures that suddenly vanished off the face of the [Music] Earth the dinosaurs though are not the first victims of a malicious Earth there have been many others most of the species that ever lived on this planet um are extinct from time to time there are moments in the punctuated history of Earth in which the rates of Extinction have accelerated enormously those moments are called mass [Music] extinction scientists recognize five major mass extinction events in the Earth's history but the one that abolished the dinosaurs may be the most critical If dinosaurs hadn't become extinct I don't think we'd be here uh it's that simple this wouldn't be a world dominating by mammals and birds would be a a world dominated by dinosaurs so the extinction of dinosaurs is perhaps the one that affects us the most as [Music] humans the world we live in may already be in the throws of its own mass extinction a new apocalypse the past mass extinctions have really shown the species can die in huge numbers and I think the lesson from them is that our society is as fragile as any number of species and that we should learn that what we have now can change can change quickly we humans are not immune we may be doing stuff to the ecosystem that will kill lots of species and eventually kill us human beings may have to face their own Extinction maybe whatever is out there in the universe is gunning for us [Music] what concerns me is what might destroy our civilization or hurt the Earth so much that life loses a lot of its meaning the string of events that erase the dinosaurs portends terrifying consequences for human civilization so what was capable of killing these formidable creatures at one time they infiltrated every corner of our planet they were incredibly diverse and well adapted animals to just about every environment you can imagine we have big dinosaurs and we have small dinosaurs we have dinosaurs with feathers and dinosaurs were worm blooded scientists have found evidence of an explosive impact formed 65 million years ago and centered in the Gulf of Mexico many believe that this is what what provoked Dino armagedon but perhaps we've overlooked the true murderer a rogue's gallery of suspects stalk the dinosaurs World brutal climates rampaging disease and Titanic volcanoes among them for decades the dominant Theory invokes a meteorite possibly an asteroid or Wayward comet it's headed for an earth that looks different than it does today ocean levels are higher meaning the meteorite is headed for a splash down Landing in what is today Mexico before it arrives though it's just another day in the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago Plante eaters like these armor-plated ankylosaurs are flourishing throughout the continent meanwhile two old rivals the feared mediating Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dangerous horn Triceratops face off in a death match hundreds of miles to the South an imposing Alamosaurus herd is on the Move Little do these giant beasts know their lives will soon end and then the apocalyptic harbon appears a new star-like light blinks on overhead this seemingly harmless spec is actually a meteor barreling toward Earth heading directly for the Gulf of Mexico when it reached the top of the Earth's atmosphere however the sky would have exploded in light creating what looks like fire falling from the sky and of course if you were that close to have seen that type of process you're life was going to be over in a matter of seconds you were far too close to survive the initial stages of the impact event that object was moving in excess of 40,000 mph when its Leading Edge touched the surface of the Gulf of Mexico its trailing Edge was still far up in the atmosphere so it was a mountainous size object that was actually larger than Mount Everest and then impact [Music] this fateful instant forever Alters the future of Life on our planet when that object slammed into yatan of Mexico first there was an instantaneous burst of heat and light traveling at the speed of light at Ground Zero everything vaporizes in a Flash this was an immense amount of energy equivalent to one 100 trillion tons of TNT by some calculations the impact exploded with a detonation greater than 5 billion atomic bombs we're not sure but the best computer projection show that an object perhaps 6 miles across plowed into the yakatan of Mexico gouging out a crater of about 180 to 200 mil in diameter and it was a life changing event Rocky debris spews outward from the impact site as far as 400 m away storms of rubble Cascade into piles up to 50 ft deep all life within this range is simply buried alive a horrifying cracking sound signals that the impact has also incited a vicious shock wave as it radiates across the landscape it carries 1,000 mph winds in its weight not only massive beasts but also entire forests yield to the shock wave because the impact event also occurred in a shallow sea it created essentially a big splash and as we all know when you Splash Something In The Water you create ripples in this case those ripples actually would have growing into tsunamis anything near the coast but out of range of the initial shock wave soon faces the power of immense walls of water 500 ft high waves crash into Coast lines all around the Gulf of Mexico and drown life for Miles Inland as dramatic as those events were and as devastating as they were for life in the Gulf of of Mexico region they were not what was responsible for the mass extinction but the asteroid only clunked a few on the head I mean how many did the asteroid actually squash so it is the effects of the asteroid that caused the kill to understand that we have to look at what we call the vapor Rich plume of debris that is ejected from the crater the ejected Rock and dust debris scream sky word at 50 times the speed of sound this Vapor plume has so much energy it actually punches through the Earth's atmosphere carrying portions of the Earth's crust some chunks of Earth even make it to the moon or go crashing into other planets but the rest falls [Music] back that m material however that does rain back down towards the Earth begins to envelope the Earth and crashes back into the top of the atmosphere around the entire world when that happens it is like trillions upon trillions of meteors hitting the atmosphere all at the same time the heavens open in a horrible rain of fire as the meteors fall the sky gets hotter and hotter everything on the surface below suddenly faces the very real possibility of being broiled [Music] [Music] alive to understand the after effects of the impact geologists visit sites like Trinidad State Park nestled in Southeastern Colorado here we can find physical evidence of the alleged dinosaur killer the impact mass extinction hypothesis is I think one of the most robust hypothesis because it is a testable hypothesis and in science that is a very important part of any hypothesis and here we can test that idea and extract evidence from The Rock record 65 million years ago this exact spot on Earth was a front row seat for the end of an age scientists refer to the last days of the dinosaurs as the Cretaceous Period and call the succeeding age which includes the rise of mammals the tertiary what is known as the Cretaceous tertiary or KT boundary divides the two eras if we take a look at these rocks we find evidence of dinosaurs and other organisms that occupied their world and The Rock higher up in this outcrop we have a material that was deposited during the terer long after dinosaurs were extinguished and the world was completely different place right in between these two units right at the KT boundary we have this very important White Strip of rock this is the KT boundary Rock and this contains evidence that tells us what happened to extinguish the dinosaurs within this thin band here in Colorado scientists have found bits of extraterrestrial meteorite mixed with pieces of Mexican rock well over 1,000 M away from the crater site although this part of the dinosaurs world did not suffer from a direct impact it did not escape the Grim Reaper reach one finds small traces of charcoal and soot both indications that there were wildfires and not only elsewhere in the world but precisely in this part of the world in addition the sediments above indicate that the landscape is completely erased of vegetation there aren't bushes there are no longer trees but the sequence of events spelled out by the impact Theory may not be revealing the truth and man's Destiny hangs in the balance [Music] beneath our cities farms and forests etched into the ground we walk on and the mountains above our heads the remnants of an Earthly apocalypse from 65 million years ago haunt Humanity many scientists believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs began then in a flash when a meteorite landed near the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico on this day over a th000 miles away in Western North America duck build dinosaurs are feeding while carnivorous feathered dinosaurs Scamper underfoot suddenly the sky above their heads begins to Glow as the leftover debris from the impact re-enters the atmosphere it Heats below its trajectory the temperature jumps up 200° a minutes it gets hotter than a charcoal grill at full bore the feathered dinosaurs and duck bills can't withstand the intensity of the sweltering Heat it actually dries out the vegetation much like wood in a Kil and spontaneously ignites it if you dig right through the surface of the Earth throughout most of North America you actually encounter a layer of carbon perhaps charred ash from The Firestorm that hit North America we now know the ultimate fate of the dinosaurs they were barbecued by that meteor or Comet that slammed into Mexico meteor fragments Cascade over the planet for 4 days and four nights new wildfires Spark by some estimates half of the world's forests burn to the ground if you want to actually cause dramatic biological effects you attack the base of the food chain on Continental regions if you burn away the vegetation you've done just that by some projections the fires release 10,000 billion tons each of carbon dioxide carbon monoxide and methane that's equivalent to 3,000 years of modern fossil fuel burning in a matter of weeks pollution suffocates the atmosphere when it does rain it is corrosively acidic and the world's ecosystems take another hit acid rain destroys plant life and poisons lakes rivers and ponds worldwide Marine plants and animals suffer the atmosphere above us is now completely choked with Dusty debris from the impact event enhanced by soot that's risen from the fires enhanced further by the sulfuric acid aerosols that were launched from the impact site with the sun obscured Earth plunges into darkness and chills dramatically the hand of the cosmic killer continues its work as it reaches for the world's dinosaurs not affected by fire those are dinosaurs that wouldn't have been wiped out in the impact event they would have been sitting there wondering what the heck's going on with our climate now this year seems unusually cloudy and cold oh what's happening here the world became a very dark place for a period of time as the darkness persisted of course the plants died and that in turn would have affected the animals themselves if you annihilate the plant communities across vast areas of landscape it's like shutting down all the grocery stores there's nowhere to go to get your fresh fruits and vegetables with nothing to eat the herbivores die when the herbivores are dead they go to carnivores so certainly within 3 months I'm sure every din on the planet was dead among the first victims are the largest plant eaters like [Music] Triceratops the situation is desperate this Triceratops herd is starving many are already dead the survivors haven't eaten anything for many days this one is so weak and its pangs of hunger so intense it has decided to eat rocks when faced with uh starvation of course animals can do some pretty amazing things and I think it's quite evident that a starving animal would eat anything it could to basically make the feeling go away it's worse for The Adolescents their growing bodies crave food they can't go as long as the adults without eating we still with fewer and fewer young the entire species is threatened as their numbers dwindle the mediators that prey on them begin to suffer as [Music] well the largest mediators starve first less and less prey remains for each individual predator and with fewer meals to go around there are fewer Predators who can [Music] survive the last T-Rex the rarest Predator dies within just week of the impact but the consequences of the impact continue to plague the planet when we talk about a mass extinction event we also have to talk about what happened in the oceans and the seaways of the world 75% of the species that existed in the world's oceans were extinguished at exactly the same time that dinosaurs disappeared just as the effects of the impact obliterate the base of the food chain on land they do the same in the oceans prolonged Darkness kills Plankton an oceanic food staple some types of mollusks and primitive squid won't make it out alive acid rain could have initially Fallen about a week after the impact event but it may have occurred at an enhanced rate for periods up to 10 years even so some of the impact related pollutants cling to the atmosphere after the impact dust settles the Earth suffers from oppressive Greenhouse temperatures and horrible [Music] droughts scientists who subscribe to the impact Theory estimate it took over 100,000 years for the terrestrial ecosystem to [Music] recover and 3 million years for the oceans to return to normal by that time though the dinosaurs were gone this is not a simple story of Extinction that is you cannot think of this as a gun and a bullet killing an organism it wasn't that type of process it was such a dramatic environmental assault on the Earth's surface that it was able to affect all of these ecosystems regardless of where they were on the Earth surface so if you ask the question what caused this organism or this particular part of the Earth's surface to be extinguished there isn't a single answer and therefore this is a process that affected not only the Tyrannosaurus reck or the duck build hadrosaurs that migrated across Colorado but it affected plants and animals both on land and in the sea wherever they were around the world what if a meteorite as big as the dinosaur killer hit today it would leave a hole in the earth big enough to smash everything from New York City to Philadelphia and that would be just the beginning when you have an asteroid H that throws up huge amounts of dust in the sky crops are going to fail absolutely going to fail without crops s you've got a lot of starving humans at minimum several billion people would die and we would be in for a struggle for mere existence an asteroid impact should have left a wasteland of dead dinosaurs but this is where the impact Theory runs into a [Music] problem if the theory is correct then that layer 66 million nth less should be full of dead dinosaurs I mean full they all died in a day or a week we should have millions of dead dinosaurs in this Impact Zone how many dead dinosaurs do we actually have worldwide in the Impact Zone rounding off none goose eggs not a one it's an elaborate crime scene Theory with the victims are already dead they're already dead could it be that something else killed the dinosaurs if so might this same something spell disaster for human [Music] civilization a Relentless onslaught of After Effects caused by a mountain-sized fireball crashing into prehistoric Mexico 65 million years ago did in the dinosaurs or so goes the theory could it be wrong problem sometimes is that people who want to have the single impact Theory don't know much about plants and animals and they'll put out scenarios that unfortunately don't fit with what we have in the fossil record of what we know about Modern Biology according to the single impact Theory the meteorite resulted in downpours of corrosive acid rain that contributed to the mass extinction if this is really what happened animals living in or near the water should have been especially hard hit and if that's the case this creature shouldn't be alive as you can see because it's s little animals breathing it's not plastic it's a living tree frog and its ancient relatives live with the Dinosaurs some 65 million years ago amphibians are extremely sensitive to environmental conditions for for example acid rain because they live and or breed in the water so they're sort of like the canary and the col mine and what this indicates is that there could not have been very strong acid rain that would have disrupted their life cycle completely the survival of tree frogs isn't the only evidence that casts doubt on the single impact Theory curiously what lived and What died after imp doesn't fit a neat pattern sharks do very poorly most of those become extinct bony fishes some survive some don't crocodiles and alligators themselves survive one of the groups that did the best in terms of survival are turtles something like 18 species of aquatic turtles survive the Cretaceous tery boundary there's one land turtle that didn't survive and that helped be living in the water like this modern alligator snapper it had ancient relatives in fact in the Cretaceous so it obviously survived cuz it's here today the survival of turtles also suggests the possibility that Earth never descended into the prolonged deep freeze described by supporters of the single impact Theory coldblooded animals like turtles and lizards can't generate their own body heat and therefore most would probably be doomed if subjected to an unusual cold spell so whatever climate change existed the end of the Cretaceous wasn't big enough to freeze a turtle if you can't freeze a turtle you can't freeze a T-Rex you just can't the climate may have changed but maybe not as drastically as the impact theory proposes if it gets real cold all of a sudden I think there'll be some serious die off and I think there will be problems but if it happens over a long range period I think a lot of animals that we know them today would [Music] [Applause] adapt another pillar of the impact theory is that pervasive Darkness starved the world's plant life resulting in a massive food shortage for the large just animals but insects need plants too and they didn't have much trouble at all there are number of groups of insects like the Crickets and Grasshoppers and beetles and things that are really exposed to the outside and if there was something that came and wiped out all the life on the face of the Earth the insect certainly would have suffered but they don't seem to have at the end of the crti all the insect fames go right through you why isn't this meteor if it if it decimated all this life on the surface of the planet how come all these insects are still around [Music] today there's more evidence from the fossil record that the impact event may not have been as severe as first believed some dinosaurs survive to this day what I'm holding my hands is a living dinosaur this animal is a white bellied stor very young and he'll soon grow up to be I guess um about a foot and a half tall something like that and when we say that he's really a dinosaur what we mean is that dinosaurs the group gave rise to birds I understand if someone looks at A T dinosaurus Rex and then at a pigon and wonders how could this be possible but you have to remember that there are millions of years of evolution separating these two species we have plenty of evidence indicating that birds evolved from some small meat eating dinosaurs that evidence comes from the shape of the bones dinosaurs with feathers and we have birds with teeth and long bony Tails so we have have been able to fill that Gap that huge anatomical Gap any theory has to be able to explain why the bird survived and the other dinosaurs didn't uh so it can't be a simple single answer that an asteroid hit and killed all the dinosaurs but left these guys [Music] intact maybe the effects of a meteorite in act on its own weren't as powerful as some think then is it just a coincidence that the dinosaurs vanished at roughly the moment the meteorite arrived some scientists believed that a different threat had already fatally weakened the dinosaurs and inevitably Humanity will need to confront it as well [Music] it seems only fitting that The Disappearance of the Ferocious dinosaurs would require a sudden catastrophic [Music] disaster but such a scenario can't explain what scientists working along the picturesque Red Deer River Valley in the Badlands of Alberta Canada have uncovered dinos dinosaurs were already Vanishing for millions of years before the meteorites struck the planet the Red Deer River is arguably one of the very best dinosaur sites anywhere in the world and we have almost 40 species of dinosaurs represented at this level in time which is about 15 million years before dinosaurs disappear so that's incredibly Rich up the red dear River you have younger rocks and in those rocks we see that there's only about 25 species of dinosaurs left as we continue along the Red Deer River we get into the terminal Cretaceous beds we've only got about six species of dinosaurs left why was the Cretaceous world so hostile to Dinosaur life at the Royal trell Museum situated in another section of Alberta's Badlands Canadians scientists may have found a cause for the mysterious disappearances you start having a climatic fluctuations you had alternating periods of really warm temperatures and really cold temperatures generally warmer temperatures support a wider variety of Lifestyles and therefore a greater number of species if you go in the tropics where it's really warm we have tremendous number of different species there's EV that actually in periods when the world was warm you have more species of dinosaurs when you get to a colder climate then usually the diversity of animals decreases so that's probably what happened at the end of the Cretaceous one of the patterns that we noticed right off the bat as we went through our Rock record here through the last 7 million years of the age of dinosaurs is as temperature sensitive animals as fossils just drop out and then they come back into the Rock record higher up that swing from present to absent seemed to be happening more and more frequently as we went up through the rock record it's easy to think that dinosaurs were evolutionary losers obsolete creatures in a rapidly changing world after all you won't find a T-Rex at your local Zoo but that not why they disappeared dinosaurs were always changing always adapting always evolving into new forms we actually don't know of any dinosaur anywhere in the world that lasted more than say 2 or 3 million years the arrival of new dinosaur species is what helped perpetuate one of the most successful and lengthy dynasties in our planet's history human Civilization by comparison still barely warrant a footnote for some perspective if we express all of the years that span the entirety of the age of dinosaurs in a physical timeline stretching across North America then the Pacific coast represents the moment the first dinosaurs appeared on Earth some 220 million years ago on the other coast the Empire State Building in New York City marks present day life in the 21st century on this scale every mile signifies about 50,000 years the age of the dinosaurs continues from California until Chicago it's not until we reach Newark New Jersey less than 20 M from the Empire State Building that humans appear on Earth written human history doesn't start until about half a block away a human life on this scale takes up just a few feet and yet with all those years of evolutionary progress suddenly the road [Music] ended the bizarre thing at the end of the Cretaceous is all those dinosaur families disappear all the horn dinosaur families all the therapod dinosaur families all disappeared in a cruel twist of fate some some dinosaurs may have been too well adapted to the wild climate fluctuations for some species their greatest strength led to their inevitable destruction the greater bulk of the largest dinosaur species would have helped them tolerate Wilder temperature extremes the elephant the largest land animal alive today provides an example they can be 12 13 F feet tall at the shoulder weigh 6 7 8 nine tons so they get very very big when you have a larger body mass if you're looking at short-term temperature changes between say day and night or between Seasons it doesn't affect you as much because your body temperature doesn't change as fast they just basically were so massive that when they were warmed up by Sunray they just stayed [Music] warm this may be why we find large dinosaur species during the shifting climates of of the late Cretaceous greater mass however also creates some important disadvantages when you're really big uh you essentially slow down your life you mate less often you have to have fewer children and you have a longer life but by having fewer children essentially what happens it means if there's a shortterm change that's quite severe then you're not able to adapt fast enough either as a species or as an individual and the chances of becoming extinct are much greater elephants require a 22-month gestation period and typically give birth to just one calf at a time in contrast rat pregnancies last only about 22 days and one female rat could have as many as 15,000 descendants in just one year larger body mass also requires more food it takes a lot of energy to keep them going they have to have food they have to have water when you get big you usually to focus on food that will bring you a lot of nutrients if you've got a an elephant on very high quality elephant food it needs 10 times 15 times as much as its own body weight per 12 months now if the food is crummy it's dry grass needs a lot more [Music] maintaining that weight forced the largest dinosaurs to evolve the optimal tools to get the most bang for their Buck out of their available food sources the hundreds of teeth lining the jaws of duck build dinosaurs cropped leaves from trees with wood chipper likee efficiency it help them grow to immense sizes measuring up to 40 ft tall and weighing as much as 3 tons these Titanic optimized eating machines with relatively small populations contained a critical flaw though what if there are no leaves what if everything's been dropped because you've gone into essentially uh wintertime conditions worldwide there's nothing for those animals to eat they're not adapted to dig up roots and survive that way other animals that were smaller possibly could have done that if climate change was driving their communities towards large size it's almost as though dinosaurs were being set up for failure once the big herbivores starved and died then all the meat disappeared for the big carnivores they couldn't of course go and Hunt smaller animals because they were too big to actually catch them too slow so they would die they are the ones that are least well adapted for rapid change unfortunately for the dinosaurs this is exactly what happened when the fist of fate in the form of a mammoth meteorite delivered a body blow to the planet the threat of climate change and its potential cataclysmic effects looms over Humanity rising oceans Mighty hurricanes and extreme drought among them but one model for dinosaur extinction suggest that its effects are more systemic I don't feel that if the asteroid had hit earlier when they had better diversity that dinosaurs would have necessarily gone extinct in this Extinction scenario the meteorite delivers a knockout blow not to a mighty dinosaur Empire but rather to a crumbling Dynasty and that's a warning for us because we're looking at a time now where we're losing a lot of our biodiversity and the question is is this setting us up for something really catastrophic to happen maybe dinosaurs have a clue on that one it may be too late some scientists believe our world today is already undergoing a mass extinction over half of all reptile and insect species are in danger as well as 3/4 of all flowering plants amphibians like frogs and salamanders have survived on this planet for over 300 million years even outlasting dinosaurs within the last quarter Century however hundreds of their kind have gone extinct global climate change has the potential to be the straw that broke the camel's back for a great many species on earth a large number of species are living in isolated little habitats that remain as we've taken over large parts of the rest of the earth if these habitats are under climate stress there's no place for the animals to go when the habitats shrink enough however you have very little resiliency and that's what worries me as species disappear we may be following dinosaurs down a dead end Road however there may be nothing we as humans can do about a future Greenhouse or Ice House World a random natural cycle may play a part we know that where I'm sitting right now was under a half a mile of ice 10,000 years ago we also know know that roughly 10,000 years from now this area will again be under a half a mile of ice where in between two glaciations these may be the result of a slight wobble in the Earth's rotation as it orbits the Sun and by looking at the accumulation of the wobbling of the earth it does seem to correlate with the known Ice Age cycles in some sense the rise of human civilization was an accident caused by the melting of the ice 10,000 years ago and we have another good 10,000 years before we either leave the Earth or go underground this may have contributed to the loss of dinosaur species however this scenario still relies on a meteorite screaming in from the heavens but some scientists believe that the meteorite might just be a red herring we have no evidence that any single dinosaur dinosaur species except Birds lived long enough to be whacked by the meteorite none this you should find deeply disturbing in other words dinosaurs may have already been extinct by the time the meteorite struck if the dinosaur world ended in a bang then where are all of the carcasses supporters of the impact Theory argue that much of the evidence has been lost to the Sans of time it's very naive to say was a catastrophic event we should find all the dead carcasses lying one next to the other [Music] there may have been a dinosaur wandering over there a mile Downstream there may have been a herd of dinosaurs 2 or 3 miles Upstream but right here where we're standing where the rock record is preserved there might not be a dinosaur Bon when we look at impact debris that can clearly be linked to an extraterrestrial body we don't expect to see that debris covering a d or bone bed but could the lack of Bones mean something else 10 billion dinosaurs died at 65.8 million years but for some reason none of them were preserved none of them do you buy this do you buy that that's like the St Valentine's Day Massacre if all the bodies were there the day before the guys with the submachine gun showed up wouldn't there be a problem in the timeline the are already dead you know they're already [Music] dead if the dinosaurs were already dead before impact what killed them off a different Theory blames a menace the dinosaurs couldn't even see scientists are sounding the alarm that the world may be undergoing a danger ous transformation they warn that if the world is indeed growing hotter one consequence may be that ocean levels could rise and drown coastlines the opposite effect might also be catastrophic the dinosaur world suffered from a collapse of sea levels and the effects may have led to the mass extinction during the Age of Dinosaurs ocean levels were much higher than they are today in North America for example everything from the Rocky Mountains to what is today the Mississippi River lay underwater then mysteriously sea levels declined and disrupted the environment you start getting a land mass being built and under those circumstances what happens is that you get a more continental climate as the sea withdrew you started getting colder Winters hotter Summers cooler nights and warmer days falling sea levels also exposed new terrain this created land bridges that connected continents once separated by water and opened the way for a dinosaur killer that may have ravaged life on Earth many times before the first time it struck may have been 250 million years ago during an age known as the peran fossilized remains from that era can be found near the town of Seymour in the wide openen spaces of North Central Texas most things lived during that time died it's the worst mass extinction that's ever existed on the face of the Earth the mass death of the peran carries special significance because it was the first Extinction for life on land this is up to to 200 million and change earlier than T-Rex earlier than the great dinosaur extinction like following a serial killer you got to look at the first one then go up in time got to look at the first one scientists working here believe they found a link between this Extinction and the one at the end of the Cretaceous that wiped out the dinosaurs if you want to know what killed the dinosaurs got to look at the very first Extinction and that brings you right here Dr Bacher and his team claim that a global pandemic of sickness and disease may have ravaged the peran world and when they looked at the factors they believe led to the outbreak of the peran they discovered similar ones at the end of the Cretaceous a pattern [Music] emerged however according to this Ness and disease Extinction scenario the climate changes involved with dropping sea levels were not what overwhelmed the dinosaurs you see the problem with a climate model for any mass extinction if you change the climate from hot to cold or dry to wet you might hurt some big dinosaurs some big mammals the other half will love it there's not one simple worldwide climate change you could produce to kill all elephants and rhinos and hipples and giraffes and water Buble can't do it can't do it as water levels fell separate continents became linked and eliminated borders between creatures if a bunch of big species from Asia invades North America and gets down to Texas all epidemological hell breaks loose each foreign species can be a pest and they bring their fleas ticks and tapeworms and nematodes they bring a host of pest with [Music] them the globe looks different today than it did during the perian the outer crust of our planet consists of plates that float over the layers of rock underneath each of these plates moves in different directions at different speeds the continents of the peran era were all stuck together forming the giant landmass of Pangia you could walk from here Seymour Texas to Morocco you could walk from Massachusetts to India you could walk from Alabama to Australia without ever Crossing an ocean we can find some of the same Geographic danger signs in the age of dinosaurs newly formed land bridges incited a dangerous wave of Dino immigration suddenly we have a connection a continental connection between North America and South America the duck bill dinosaurs that are common here in Alberta are suddenly appearing down in Argentina the sorod dinosaurs which had already become extinct in North America suddenly appear again in North America and Texas and Utah and places like that those big Sor pods are in fact migrants coming from South America using the same land bridge that allowed the hydrosaurus to go south because the largest animals were capable of traveling the farthest they put themselves at greatest risk big animals have a natural ability to spread elephants soon as new species of elephants evolved in the age of mammals that spread from Africa to Europe Europe to India and some made it from from India to Siberia to North America and all the way down to Tero to aluo very impressive being big confers that power of Tourism once they're on the Move organisms can cause problem simply by disturbing the natural cycle of the environment they're invading the invading species is a danger for a bunch of reasons it could kill you could be a new Predator could rob you of food could rob you of places to make a nest of your young it could Chase your young it could squash your young and those are the least dangerous things infinitely more destructive are the illnesses delivered and picked up by Nature's migrants an animal's natural defenses developed over generations for a certain environment may turn out to be completely useless in another moose and deer make each other sick African elephants and Indian elephants make each other sick because their immune systems have evolved to handle different pests the mixing of species can cause every meal to become potentially lethal but every time you eat leaves grass branches fruit you can get some unwanted microbes who can run a muck in your gut causing you well for instance diarrhea diarrhea can dehydrate an adult male in a week and kill an infant in a day diarrhea is the symptom that kills more humans than any other symptom can be caused by many things but alas people die of diarrhea all the time diarrhea ain't no [Music] joke the nefarious range of afflictions affecting the largest dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous reached debilitating levels some of Nature's smallest creatures only made things worse as if teleported to the present by a time machine these very insects preserved perfectly in fossilized Amber once walked flew and even fed on dinosaurs Dr George poar believes that the pathogens insects carried assaulted dinosaurs relentlessly from all angles and ultimately played a serious role in their demise and these are three nematodes that came from a capsule in the body cavity of a cockroach cockroaches will uh eat the eggs of these and then if the dinosaur came along and ate the Cockroach it would get infected they look harmless but once inside the body these worms grew into dinosaur assassins this is usually the typical way in which uh these things are found here's one for instance here being stricken by stomach worm is gruesome and torturous the nematode eggs start in the stomach but work their way into the lung tissue this induces a coughing fit the eggs ejected from the lungs return to the stomach where they hatch and grow into worms as they grow larger and fill the stomach the duck bill loses its appetite and weakens the worms can eat even cause organs to rupture the largest Nemo today is about 27 ft so it's possible for these nitos to reach large sizes under the right [Music] conditions exotic biting insects also targeted dinosaurs mercilessly they came for blood and often Left Behind deadly illness the Sandfly reigned as one of the most successful dinosaur hunters of its day in part because it developed the perfect utensils for Dino dining and if you look very carefully at the mandibles of the Sandfly you see that they resemble the edges of common steak knives today as sandflies arrive to torment this Triceratops they put their steak Knife mandibles to good use so what we have are a pair of mandibles and first one is inserted a little bit into the Flesh and then the other one is inserted into the flesh you have these blades going back and forth very quickly and they simply cut through the flesh it's a really a Marvel of invention targeting the most sensitive areas the sandflies Swarm the soft tissues around the eyes nose and mouth according to poinar dinosaurs may not have been able to defend themselves Against The Fleets of flying insects I think the dinosaurs would have essentially been sitting ducks to these insects what the dinosaurs really have in order to uh get rid of these to Sho the Flies supposedly I mean it didn't have long tals like horses you often see horses standing back to head where the tail of one Brites of flies from the head of the other one as sandflies gorge on blood they inject a dangerous illness called leash [Music] Mania it's a disease that exists to this day modern Sandfly cousins are carriers it travels the blood attacking organs and causes internal bleeding and death this adult Tri aops is sick but she is just one of many in Her Herd suffering from a virulent strain of leash Mania blotches and Soares mean she's in a badly weakened [Music] State dinosaur species were very closely related to each other therefore once a killer disease got hold of one species it may have spread to others with frightening ease trailing T-rex's see an opportunity their hunger will soon be satiated meal time for the Predators begins as they eat the virus coursing through the sicken Triceratops infects the Scavengers this will be their last supper ultimately the Sandfly terrorists will decimate the rest of the Triceratops her as well [Music] this one insect and one disease could have wiped out thousands of dinosaurs but it would take more than that to tackle the entire species multiple diseases multiple pests multiple invasive species 10 20 30 40 they could penetrate every habitat and wreak havoc it was a combination of diseases that spread throughout the dinosaur population [Music] this is what I'd like to do I think this is very important call a timeout to all thinking and Publishing by paleontologist about Extinction for 5 years and every one of us should be forced to intern at the Bronx Zoo San Diego wild animal park and Wyoming fishing game and learn what guys who worry about Extinction of living animals are concerned about and it's not a meteorite disease pest competition between African and Indian Critters that's number [Music] one the power of disease to shape world history can be found even in comparatively recent times nothing has killed more people not natural disasters not famine and not even Wars the Poss possibility of a great plague of course resonates with human history because we've had plagues in the past in some cases they wiped out whole pockets of civilization in Ireland when you had this Potato Famine you know there was a disease that came in that killed all the potatoes people began starving and then you had a number of diseases that came in and wiped out a large number of the population people observing this from the healthful safety of modern civilization forget the power of deadly microbes they're living happily and nothing has happened to them if they go down into the tropics like in Africa or Asia today and look around and see the kind of things that that are occurring suddenly they get a different view disease takes on a different aspect disease then becomes a controlling Factor not something that we control but something that controls [Music] us technology provides the the land bridges of our time and teamed with environmental changes could expose Humanity to new diseases we may be on the precipice of a new Global plague if disease extinguish the dinosaurs could it do the same to human beings plague has the possibility that an asteroidal impact doesn't have and that is of wiping out absolutely everybody but it's very unlikely for one thing Pockets down in nuclear submarines at the bottom of the sea could simply wait the plague out until all previous victims are already dead the scientific Community however hasn't embraced the idea of a Cretaceous Era dinosaur killing pandemic to see the entire group being annihilated by disease is a little hard to swallow with a global Cosmopolitan distribution of dinosaurs in different dinosaur groups uh nothing that we know of on this planet works homogeneously over the whole surface of the planet and how do you explain that those diseases killed seagoing animals like marine reptiles ammonites animals that are so distantly related that they probably wouldn't have been affected by diseases that grew on land the answer May lie in another Cretaceous Era apocalyptic Force One that vomits the fires of hell all over a helpless Dinosaur [Music] [Music] World these Jagged step-like Mountains of central India known as The Deen traps contain the leftovers of another dinosaur era Disaster One perhaps many times s more ruinous than the meteorite impact or disappearing Seas according to G to Keller a mass extinctions expert from Princeton University the key to the extinction of the dinosaurs can be found there although calm and peaceful today 65 million years ago India was the epicenter of Destruction a massive outpouring of volcanic lava formed this entire range it covers 200,000 Square mil an area about the size of Texas and its tallest Peaks reach over a mile high it started when plumes of molten magma from deep within the Earth burst through the surface High Columns of fires blasted gas and Ash into the stratosphere and on the bottom you had this lava sheets flowing out and covering the area Miles and Miles hundreds thousands of miles these volcanic eruptions called flood basalts are not equivalent to Mount St Helens or some volcano that we see in the news these are great fissures in the Earth the crust of the earth splits apart lava pours out as destructive as the lava flows were it was the noxious gas es beling out that brought the ultimate extermination human history provides a harrowing example on June 8th 1783 near the town of locki in Iceland a volcano erupted it lasted for 8 months with brutal consequences the sun turned flood red and a very thick Haze covered essentially not just Iceland but spread over Europe it instantly killed 50% of the livestock after that poison rain fell from the sky sick with Ash sulfur and salt it coated all the plants which turned bright yellow and withered and died it caused enormous famine and about 25% of the population [Music] side the haze disrupted worldwide weather patterns that summer Europe endured unprecedented high temperatures and the following winter brought record cold to as far away as North [Music] America as destru structive as locky was it was nothing but a squirt gun compared to the cannon fire of the decan eruptions they were up to 5,000 times larger and would seem to be a leading dinosaur killing suspect but many scientists don't believe that the decan eruptions caused the mass extinction why it's the same reason a similar series of eruptions about 17 million years ago from the the Columbia Plateau in America's Pacific Northwest didn't cause a mass extinction of its own all these are volcanic rocks essentially from uh one single eruption in the Colombia plateau basals and so they represent one of these pulse eruptions and it would have deposited perhaps within days or weeks when you go further down this mountain you will find a plateau which appears to be the break between this eruption and the next each successive pulse created another layer and added a step to the Columbia formation and even though the volcanic lava spread out over tens of thousands of square miles it didn't have the Earth shattering effect you might expect the reason Reon is that all of the Columbia Plateau pulses took more than 10 million years to form the long intervals between each eruption allowed the surrounding environment to recover if you just have one pulse that lasts for 10 years it could be washed out within 10 to 100 years afterwards but if the next eruption went off before the environment fully recuperated living conditions would have worsened [Music] exponentially the conventional wisdom held that the decan traps were blunted because they erupted over a million-year time frame in the last few years all this has changed the eruptions now are known to occur over very short time like 10,000 to 100,000 years new dating techniques have revealed that the bulk up to 80% of the decen eruptions began near the end of the Cretaceous and finished at the time of the mass extinction in effect the pulsed explosions of the decan volcanoes threw a rapid series of deadly blows to the world's ecosystems just one major eruption pulse could have injected as much poison gas into the atmosphere as the Yucatan impact [Music] both for catastrophes that would have caused earthquakes tsunamis fires although not Global fires but certainly Regional fires acid rain poisonous clouds of gas and cooling however all the pulses taken together would have had the effect of doz thousand of meteorite impacts spread out over thousands of years the effects of India's volcanoes engulfed the [Music] planet Keller believes the decan volcanoes Unleashed poisonous gas clouds that blocked sunlight animals in the neighborhood would have struggled to breathe and Rain would have absorbed the Airborne gases wrecking vegetation worldwide as it fell basically we can say we found the Smoking Gun the dean volcanism Theory becomes the main Contender for the mass extinction super volcanism may even lead to a mass extinction of humans one of America's most popular tourist destinations happens to sit on top of one of these ticking time bombs a meteorite impact climate change falling sea levels disease volcanoes what killed the dinosaurs and which scenario most threatens human civilization there's a difference between the kind of catastrophe that could would knock us down maybe kill 90% of humans 99% and actually extinguishing humans those are two different things you can wipe out 99% of the cockroaches in your house and they're still going to be a breeding pair somewhere it's tempting to think that whatever knocked out the dinosaurs could never be a problem today but what's bubbling beneath Yellowstone National Park right now proves otherwise the park sits on a vast reservoir of magma essentially a giant volcano scientists believe it erupts every 600,000 years and the last eruption was 640,000 years ago we're [Music] overdue a gigantic super Volcan volano explosion of Yellowstone could have the same effects as an asteroid impact in which case billions would die and the survivors would struggle humans might soon be forced to face an environment like the one that may have assaulted the dinosaurs during the deck [Music] interuptions on the other hand the dinosaurs could have been the victims of an ancient Terminator one that keeps coming back and might strike us next every 26 million years or so we're not quite sure there seems to be a massive Extinction and so the question is what in the world could come back every 26 million years a suspect looms at the distant fringes of our solar system a horde of comets giant orbiting Ice Cube tubes known as the or Cloud could be responsible for Mass death as our solar system travels through the Milky Way it dips into and out of the dense dust filled Central band of our galaxy roughly every 26 million years it'll encounter the dust and that'll jiggle the or Cloud these stationary ice cubes in space will then be jostled and will come raining down toward the sun creating a comet storm that can perhaps Wipe Out the planet Earth so the motion of the solar system in the Galaxy like a hobby horse in a merar around could in fact have cped out the dinosaurs if so that means we're due for another big one in perhaps another 13 million years the solar system is like a shooting gallery look at the Moon every night it comes out and you can see pock marks from heavy bombardment that took place on the moon if you take a look at Mars you see also evidence of enormous gigantic comets that rain down on the red planet so we have ample evidence that in the past the solar system was a shooting gallery an aerial bombardment crushing our civilization might still be millions of years away but another potential dinosaur killer also born in the depths of space may not give us any warning well human extinction could be brought about by nasty things from space whenever a massive star larger than our sun runs out of fuel it collapses under its own weight and erupts into a supernova if a star explodes within 25 light years of the planet Earth it could very well turn life on the surface of the Earth into a hell if we have this blast of energy coming from a supernova first of all it will hit the atmosphere of the earth and perhaps blow off and destabilize our ozone layer without an ozone layer to protect the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation x-ray radiation from the sun we would be bathed in dangerous radiation we might have to live underground and develop crops that can withstand the lack of an ozone layer it would be one of those intermediate events where billions might die and some would keep going might an exploding star have van the dinosaurs a wave of radiation has been found that would have actually passed through this planet about 65 million years ago which makes it a little suspect that star did go supernova at the right time to affect the [Music] Earth the repercussions would have been Wicked so we're talking about an object that flares up visible in daytime and at night it would outshine even the Moon it would be perhaps the brightest object in the night sky we would have this rain of harsh radiation coming down on the earth wiping out any animals that are exposed to sunlight exposed to the atmosphere of the planet Earth any animals with eyes would be blinded not to mention horrible sunburns there's no doubt that radiation of course causes changes to our genome that uh Cana of course Cancers and things like that plants would die vegetation would Wither on the Vine with this enormous withering blast of radiation from outter space and then animals that eat vegetables and vegitation would also begin to die and then meat eaters would also die as a consequence science however isn't persuaded by the suggestion of a dinosaur killing Supernova there just aren't enough bones sitting on the Cretaceous tertiary boundary to say that okay the dinosaurs may have been affected more by a massive dose of radiation than than other animals we just don't see it in the fossils themselves this is why the answer for what killed the dinosaurs has eluded us for so long we don't really have a perfect book with every page of the fossil record there are many many pages that are missing what we do not know well is what happened exactly at the Cretaceous tertiary boundary and that's the kind of evidence that we need to answer the question of what happened to the large dinosaurs because it's then when they became extinct only by bringing all of the theories together may we finally have an answer for The Disappearance of the dinosaurs and a verdict for what may do [Music] Humanity ever since we discovered the first evidence of dinosaurs we've been entranced with their lives they're fun they illuminate your brain with all these shapes and sizes and colors and different periods Triassic Jurassic Cretaceous it overwhelms you it's really cool it's the pre historic [Music] Zoo but it's their deaths we need to understand it may be that we can learn some lessons from a mass extinction that was closest to today than anything [Music] before with the potential fate of humanity hanging in the balance we can't afford to get it wrong these were horrendous creatures that suddenly vanished off the face face of the Earth it's almost as though dinosaurs were being set up for failure earthquakes tsunamis poisonous clouds winter time conditions worldwide elaborate crime scene Theory where the victims are already dead they're already dead trillions upon trillions of meteors poisonous gas clouds hitting the atmosphere all at the same time the earth crack open all epidemological hell breaks through the Earth portions of the Earth following a serial killer explode that always spells disaster the truth has been elusive people like a single answer they like a single cause it's how our minds work and it's certainly how science Works to a degree to find the single cause if you're trying the asteroid for murder one for killing the dinosaurs murdering the dinosaurs would you have enough evidence to convict in reality probably not but it's going to be some sort of mixture of a lot of different factors that come together that created the events that led to the extinction of these animals it's a Confluence of events things all coming together at one time where wow if they came separately you could deal with them but when they come Al together it's it's just too much maybe this is the true answer to the mystery a perfect concert of Mega disasters inundated the world of the dinosaurs and brought it to its knees decen volcanoes were mauling the Earth's environment for many Millennia these eruptive pulses aided by declining Seas may have helped induce the wild fluctuations of the earth's climate from Greenhouse to ice house and back this caused the diversity of dinosaur species to fall to a precarious view meanwhile the falling Seas opened land bridges and helped let loose a horde of pathogens then came the last straw a massive [Music] meteor when dinosaurs were really at their lowest point in biodiversity is when the asteroid hit so it was a very very bad day for them an asteroid can cause Extinction if it hits an ecosystem that's already hit hard by something else so the meteorite thought to be the arch villain in the dinosaur extinction drama May really have played only a supporting role it might have just been adding insult to an already fatal injury all I can conclude is that we have vastly overestimated the catastrophic effects of an impact I believe the dinosaurs were doomed whether or not there was an asteroid hitting the Earth either way this is not a simple tale of impact followed by Extinction a complex interaction of events combined to fulfill a fate many thousands of years in the making which one of these is the greatest threat to our way of life pay attention to all of them because there are probably so many that it's going to take a DI open-minded and fantastically curious civilization to even deal with the ones we can spot and it's going to take a resilient and robust civilization to deal with the ones that hit us out of the dark and if we're not ready then we're doomed to repeat history dinosaurs were changing and evolving coming larger brain faster animals more diverse more behaviorally complex they were doing all the kinds of things that we think ourselves make mammals successful but dinosaurs were doing them too and if they hadn't become extinct I think they would have got there before us in most cases in other words dinosaurs might still be the planet's ruling [Music] class thankfully they're not otherwise the human race may never have had a chance at life [Music]