The 7 Most Depressing Theories for Dinosaur Extinction

I clearly remember the thrill of Jurassic Park, the apathy of Jurassic Park 2 and the disgust brought on by Jurassic Park 3. Rumors of Jurassic Park 4 are starting to surface again and that means either an awesome new direction or cinematic lung butter.

When I was a kid, dinosaurs were the shit. They were giant lizards that stomped around all giant, there’s nothing cooler to a boy. If they shot fireballs, served beer and were ridden around by sexy women they’d be the awesomest thing for men, too. But they died before we could arrange for that.

There are as many theories for the extinction of dinosaurs as there are people who proposed those theories, because otherwise they wouldn’t exist. That aside, while the popular theories like an asteroid hitting the earth get all the glory and seem all kinds of badass, other theories float around that make the dinosaurs seem like a bunch of bus-sized pussies who just couldn’t hack it.

Paleoweltschmerz

Leave it to the Germans to think up a word where no word was or even is needed, and then apply it to the biggest extinction event in the history of the planet. Or the smallest one, what do we know? Anyway, unlike kickass terms like doppelganger which help us with efficiency of language when it comes to explaining our evil clone to others, Paleoweltschmerz is just sad on every level. It’s not a giant fireball that swallowed the dinosaurs, or an alien race that took them to a new world, it’s boredom. It’s the theory that dinosaurs, having ruled the earth for however many millions of years, just got sick of that shit and quit living out of depression and boredom. Indeed, some German proposed all dinosaurs turned hardcore emo, apparently all at once, and it took off like gangbusters.

Constipation

If you’ve ever had to wait to use the bathroom after a 43ft long, 7 ton constipated Tyrannosaurus Rex you can fully appreciate just how awful it can be when a dinosaur simply can’t take a shit. Now try to imagine every dinosaur unable to take a shit. Tough break.

According to E. Baldwin, a man more enamored by the inner workings of giant, reptilian asses than Rush Limbaugh’s proctologist, the Cretaceous period was a real kick in the pants for dinosaurs as it saw a huge decline in plants that had natural laxative oils. The result of this was a lot of stegosaurs presumably being forced to eat copious amounts of cheese. As the plants continued to die off, so too did the dinosaurs’ puckers become tighter until they simply died from being so utterly full of shit, causing modern science to speculate that Metamucil is the only reason Nancy Grace is still alive.

Lack of Lady Folk

Most of us are aware of the theory that a giant meteor crashed to earth when dino-Bruce Willis was too busy to blow it up, thus destroying nearly everything, everywhere. Another theory states that the meteor was less world destroying and more shit-weather inducing, such that it altered the world climate. This climate change ended up being an issue as it’s believed the change in temperature caused the dinosaurs to either produce only male or female offspring.

As you can imagine, a world full of only dino dudes would be the same kind of sausage party the folks at Jurassic Park were planning, minus the poorly written loophole that allowed for spontaneous sex change. And a sausage party can only last for so long before everyone checks out, in this case permanently.

Fart Greenhouse Effect

An awesome way to go out would be a mid air collision, or maybe falling off a skyscraper while simultaneously falling victim to spontaneous combustion. An unawesome way to go out is to fart so much it ruins the entire planet. It’s kind of funny, in a big picture sort of way, but not really awesome. Nonetheless, it’s been hypothesized that dinosaurs fell victim to their own giant asses.

A dinosaur, say one that weighed 80 tons or so and ate hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of food per day would be likely to have the kind of epic farts that would render flesh from bone and caused those within range to lose faith in a higher power. Now if you have thousands of these beasts roaming the earth for millions of years, that gas is eventually going to cause a massive problem. In this case the problem was ass blasting the ozone layer until the climate changed so significantly that it changed the available vegetation and the poor bastards starved themselves. How this never happens in Mexico is anyone’s guess.

Cataracts

Few theories top this one for sheer lameness, but someone took the time to craft it, presumably someone who went to school to learn how to make up bullshit theories about things that happened 65 million years ago, so let’s enjoy it.

The idea behind this is that dinosaurs were a lot like kids in science class during an eclipse. Sure the teacher said not to look directly at it, and you probably wouldn’t have looked if the teacher didn’t say so, but then you did look. Shit. Except they did that every day in what we assume was a really sunny part of the world. So all that sun exposure lead to wicked bad cataracts. And that wouldn’t have been so bad except they were bumbling Magoo-style dinosaurs that wandered off cliffs. If you’re thinking “wait, is this theory suggesting every dinosaur went blind and fell off a cliff?” the answer is apparently yes. Don’t look at me, it’s not my theory.

Sluttyness

This theory pops up enough when you Google it to make it seem like it’s not a joke, even though few people admit to believing the theory and the specifics are generally left by the wayside. Usually it’s lumped in bigger lists and you’re just meant to read it, have a chuckle the way grandpa would when he saw women driving, and move on. But honestly, there has to be more to it than that.

The gist of this theory is that dinosaurs humped all the time, they were like small dogs or university girls, and all that humping gave rise to dinosaur AIDS or some shit like that, and that in turn wiped out all the dinosaurs. It’s as awesome as it is hilarious and probably just as full of crap. Honestly, you know there would have been at least a handful of dinosaurs that pretended to be skanks but in real life never put out, and they would have survived.

The icing on the slutty dino cake of this theory is that at least one person has suggested that the AIDS virus came from space. Why space was necessary, I don’t know, but I like the idea that a T-Rex saw a meteor one day and totally f*cked the shit out of it, got some sores on his dino dong and figured “whatever” then set about on a hump spree that wiped his entire species from the planet.

Mental Disorders

Dinosaurs are known to have been less than intelligent, as far as anyone has told us. Then again, Michael Crichton tried to tell us raptors were like taloned Hannibal Lecters and T-Rex’s couldn’t see you unless you moved, so it’s hard to know what nuggets of truth to cling to in the toilet of shit people make up.

Someone out there has theorized that dinosaurs’ brains were so small they basically became fatally retarded. This is dumb on a Jersey Shore scale, wherein their poor little noggins just couldn’t cope with even the slightest environmental changes, rendering them unable to adapt with changes in their world. Does that seem entirely reasonable for a species that dominated the Earth for millions of years? I have no idea, I’ve never been that retarded. And if I ever get that retarded, I won’t even realize it, I’ll just die because I forgot to eat or breathe or got my head stuck in a bannister and no one will really be able to figure it out until millions of years later.