d by dinosaurs and other creatures? Or was the old fauna suddenly destroyed by a catastrophic event of much shorter duration? And most important, what caused this greatest of mass extinctions? Could it happen again?" (Ward 54). The issue would then be whether the dinosaurs had died out all of a sudden or over a period of time--was this a catastrophic event, or was it a gradual event?
The genetic explanation would hold that the dinosaurs simply ceased evolving or reached an evolutionary dead-end. Among the possible problems that genetics could include would be susceptibility to disease, lack of good sensory perception, or poor reproductive capacity (Raup 5). Natural historians long tried to show that such an extinction was inevitable and that the disappearance of the dinosaurs was necessary to make room for the long chain of mammals from which we emerged. This was seen as a natural development. It also followed Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, whereby rival organisms are pitted against each other in an environment containing limited resources, meaning that there was a conflict between the dinosaurs and the mammals. The latter won the battle because, despite the terrifying power of the dinosaurs, the future was on their side. As warm blooded creatures, mammals were more able to adapt to a changing climate. They were also smaller, meaning they were more agile and had a greater capacity for brain development. Under this view, the laws of evolution gradually tipped the balance in favor of the mammals and so condemned the dinosaurs to extinction (Bocchi and Ceruti 26).
However, current research suggests that this is an unlikely scenario. For one thing, mammals existed at the same time as the dinosaurs, at the beginning of the Mesozoic period, and the two lived together on earth for about 150 million years. There is no indication that during this long era there was any gradual extension of the ecobiologica...