The cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs has long been attributed to a massive asteroid that collided with the Earth some 65 million years ago, but Dr. Irving G. Gordon, professor of paleontology at Montana State University, has proposed a new theory that the dinosaurs were killed by being suddenly encased in solid rock.
After observing excavations over 20 years, Gordon has found that when a new dinosaur fossil is discovered, it is invariably embedded in rock. “I began to notice an unmistakable pattern, and simply added two and two together,” he says. “This is how science works.”
His new theory postulates that once the solid rock snuck up behind the dinosaurs and trapped them in it, the dinosaurs would have been unable to breathe, eat, or reproduce. “They would not have been able to move,” he says. “Let’s not overthink this.”
Despite initial skepticism from colleagues, a consensus is quickly emerging among leading paleontologists, geologists, and biologists, giving weight to Gordon’s groundbreaking theory.
“To thrive in their new rock-based environment, dinosaurs would have had to adapt hammer-like appendages to chisel their way out,” says paleontologist Alan C. Walker, a 1986 Guggenheim Fellow in Social Sciences. “There is no evidence they did so.”
Gordon says that if immense rocks had not subsumed the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago, dinosaurs would still be alive today, walking among us. “With the mystery of dinosaur extinction solved, the new question paleontology must now answer is, what happened to the rock monsters who ate the dinosaurs?”
Gordon is now working to learn everything he can about the giant killer rocks so that the human species can avoid meeting a similar fate.
