Creation Station
Amazing Animals
Why Are They Gone? What Really Causes Animal Extinction
The question that I am probably asked more than any other is, what caused the dinosaurs to go extinct? There are only two reasons why any species goes extinct, number one is a significant degradation of their environment and number two is people. Degradation can be of the land, weather, food supply and the like. For instance if all of the wetlands of the world were dried up, alligators and crocodiles would die off. If all the eucalyptus trees were to die off, then koalas would go extinct. Pandas are now an endangered species because the bamboo forests in China are being cut down. These animals, and others like them, are very environmentally specific, change their environment too much and they will die off. Although we can never know all of the environmental needs of dinosaurs, we do know that the Genesis Flood was the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the earth. The fossil record tells us that over half of all the kinds of land animals that existed before the Flood are now extinct. Due to changes in the post-Flood world, dinosaurs were just one of the many kinds of animals that could no longer exist in the new world. People of course are the second reason for extinction; people can and have wiped out whole species of animals.
Evolutionists favorite dinosaur extinction story is that a meteor hit the earth near the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and that this impact caused massive weather changes that killed off many animals, including dinosaurs. They base their speculation on the fact that in the rock layers that contain many dinosaur fossils is a thin layer of the mineral iridium and that iridium exists in some meteors. What is not usually reported is that iridium also exists in volcanoes. The Genesis Flood caused massive eruptions of volcanoes that would have released iridium that would have been laid down at the same time that dinosaurs were being buried. The Flood may indeed have been caused by meteor impacts, but it didn’t directly cause any land animal extinctions, because a representative of every kind of land animal was already safely on the Ark. When the facts about earth history are understood thru a Biblical worldview, the truth becomes apparent, to those who want to see it.
