Dinosaur Extinction: Currents Theories and Explanations
Mass extinctions of plants and animals have occurred many times in the history of the earth, one of the most widely known being that of the dinosaur over 65 million years ago. Many theories as to why the dinosaurs became extinct exist, including volcanic eruptions, changes in climate, diseases, radiation form a nearby supernova, and giant meteor and/or comet impacts. Although loyal believers back all of these theories, no one single theory has been accepted by the scientific community as a whole (Blanchard, 1999).

Most theories surrounding dinosaur extinction revolve around the era of time known as the K-T boundary, the period between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. Supporting evidence of this time frame exists in the fossils found throughout the Mesozoic era, while no such fossils exist for the Cenozoic era (Blanchard, 1999). Yet using fossils to either prove or disprove a theory…...

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References

Archibald, J.D. (1996). Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era: What the Fossils Say. New York: Columbia University Press.

Blanchard, D.L. (1999). Dinosaur Extinction. Online. Morrison Natural History Museum. Available February 8, 2002: http://town.morrison.co.us/dinosaur/extinction/index.shtml.

Eldredge, N. (Ed.). (1987). The Natural History Reader in Evolution. New York: Columbia University Press.

Raup, D. & Sepkoski, J.J. (1986). Periodic Extinction of Families and Genera. Science Magazine.

He describes how wild grains and animals were domesticated, as well as the new technologies that made farming possible (sickles, baskets, pestles, gourds, irrigation, the wheel, the plow). He uses a chart to plot these movements. His evidence is mainly archeological, historical, and botanical with heavy doses of appeal to imaginary scenarios. Its power to convince is narrational. His ultimate point in cataloguing this change is to assert how, for first time in history, humans become a prime factor in altering earth's natural landscapes. Land was now exploited and degraded through deforestation for crops and soil erosion.
Summary: Ruddiman summarizes the history of how humans began to shape the earth through technology and landscape transformation. He relies on the credibility of his narrative.

Ch. 8, pp. 76-83: His main claim is that humans rather than nature have created a rise in atmospheric methane. He presents several lines of argument, beginning with…...

Deposition occurred over a very long time period. The study found that the sediments separating the two events were characteristic of normal sedimentation, with burrows formed by creatures colonizing the ocean floor, erosion and transportation of sediments, and no evidence of structural disturbance" which means that there is no reason to believe that the asteroid impacted normal life in measurable fashion very quickly, or that fossil evidence of the asteroid's impact had been disrupted (New blow against dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, geologists find, 2009, National Science Foundation).
Even defenders of the asteroid theory think it is unlikely that it was a one-time event that killed most of the life on planet earth, and believe that the asteroids created inhospitable conditions that developed over time. Recent research also indicates that the asteroid "landed in deeper water than previously assumed and therefore released about 6.5 times more water vapor into the atmosphere. The…...

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Works Cited

Geologist gets to the bottom of Chicxulub impact crater. (2007, January 22).

University of Alaska Fairbanks. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 3, 2009, from   / releases/2007/01/070118094039.htmhttp://www.sciencedaily.com ?

Hypothesis: Asteroid impact. (2009). Evolution: What killed the dinosaurs? PBS.

Retrieved May 3, 2009 at  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/dinosaurs/asteroid.html

Dinosaurs: arm-Blooded?
There is presently much controversy regarding the issue of dinosaurs, as the fact that experts have access to a limited amount of resources concerning this matter makes it difficult for them to express certainties concerning this particular animal reign. Even with the fact that there are presently no living dinosaurs to be dissected, scientists have come up with a series of theories based on how dinosaurs behaved. In spite of their physiology, most dinosaurs put across behavior characteristic to mammals and birds. One of the oldest debates in the history of dinosaur studies is related to the blood temperatures of these creatures, as some experts insist that they were cold-blooded while others maintain that they were warm-blooded. The presence of dinosaur fossils at high altitudes makes it possible for one to consider that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, taking into account that cold-blooded creatures typically evolve in warm areas.

All living bodies…...

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Works cited:

Misiroglu, Gina, "The Handy Answer Book for Kids (and Parents)," (Visible Ink Press, 2009)

Norell, Mark; Gaffney, Eugene S.; and Dingus, Lowell, "Discovering dinosaurs: evolution, extinction, and the lessons of prehistory," (University of California Press, 2000)

Norman, David, "Dinosaurs: a very short introduction," (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Godzilla (1954) was the original science fiction class that inspired a large number of sequels over the next twenty years, and as usual with this genre reflected contemporary Cold War fears and anxieties about nuclear weapons. In this case, hydrogen bomb tests is the Pacific created a radioactive dinosaur that made its way bad to Japan and destroyed okyo. Japan's cities had been firebombed into destruction during World War II, and it was the only country in history to ever experience a nuclear attack -- just nine years before this film was made -- so the idea that some prehistoric monster might devastate the country had a special relevance there. In the 1950s, of course, there were many science fiction films about radioactive monsters, such as the giant ants in hem or the dinosaur that attacked London in Behemoth, so the symbolism of these mutations destroying the world was commonplace.…...

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This is what happens in the climax of Godzilla, when a reluctant scientist, Professor Serizawa, uses a new super weapon that destroys all the oxygen in water and kills Godzilla in Tokyo Bay. Serizawa is a wounded veteran of the Second World War, missing one eye, and does not want the world to possess another terrible weapon like this. He decides to destroy all the records of his research and then dies in Tokyo Bay with Godzilla after placing his oxygen destroyer near the monster. By the standards of 1954, the special effects in the film were quite advanced, and the actor wearing the Godzilla costume had the best role, although the monster looked quite impressive when it breathed out radioactive fire all over the models of Tokyo. A young Aaron Burr also had an early role in this film as an American reporter covering the Godzilla story as the creature goes on a rampage.

At the beginning of the film, a ship is destroyed in a mysterious explosion and a salvage team is sent to investigate, but their ship is also blown up. On Odo Island, three survivors from these ships report that a giant monster was responsible, while fishermen report that they are unable to catch anything. This is when an old man first mentions the name of Godzilla, an ancient Japanese legend about a dinosaur that lives in the ocean. That same night, during a typhoon, Godzilla actually comes ashore and destroys some houses, and a scientific team is sent from Tokyo to investigate. They discover that Godzilla is a radioactive monster that has been disturbed by the recent hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, and has already destroyed a number of ships in retaliation. Although the Japanese navy drops depth charges on the monster, conventional weapons do not seem to have much effect, which is when the scientists turn to Professor Serizawa.

At first the scientist denies that he has created a new weapon, but the truth is that he does not want the world to know about it since it could cause the extinction of all life on earth. He shows his fiance Emiko what it can do, by testing a small sample in a fish tank and turning every living thing into a skeleton. Emiko is horrified and agrees to say nothing about the weapon, although shortly afterward Godzilla comes ashore twice and destroys Tokyo. With the city in ruins and Godzilla still sitting at the bottom of Tokyo Bay, Serizawa agrees that the weapon must be used, but he makes sure that he will die with it. He goes to the bottom of Tokyo Bay in a diving suit and places the device near Godzilla, but then cuts his own air hose and remains in place when it detonates. Godzilla is reduced to a skeleton and sinks to the bottom of the bay, although he returned many times in the sequels.

Supercontinent Theory
The physical geology of the earth consists of a Core (inner and outer), the mantle, the asthenosphere and the lithosphere. The lithosphere is the crust and upper mantle of the earth that is the hard and rigid layer in which humans live. This portion of the earth reacts to the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere through erosion and weathering, resulting in the soil forming process (Johnson, 2006). These layers of the earth are constantly in motion, giving us the Plate Tectonics, or Continental Drift, theory. Briefly, the theory states that the continents move across the molten plate of the earth -- drifting over time based on the rotation of the earth. The early evidence for this, of course, was that the eastern part of South America and Western Part of Africa fit together quite well. However, studies after 1958 show that there are three major reasons why the "drift" theory…...

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REFERENCES

Frankel, H. (2012). The Continental Drift Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, R. (2006). Plate Tectonics -- Great Ideas in Science. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publishing Company.

United States Geological Society. (2009). Plate Tectonics. Retrieved from:

 http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/historical.html

TED Talks
Ideas worth Spreading

Nina Jablonski breaks the illusion of skin color (TED2009, 2009)

Nina Joblonski opens by commenting on Darwin's pigmentation and his upbringing. She further speaks of his voyage on the Beagle and his interest in the pigmentation of humans. Darwin did not believe that there was any correlation to skin pigmentation and climate. However, Joblonski points out that if Darwin had access to NASA satellites that he may have come to a different conclusion. One of NASA's satellites has capabilities to monitor the Earth's radiation close to the surface. As a result, researchers today have been able to study skin pigmentation and the exposure to solar radiation and find that there is a perfect gradient and strong correlation between the two.

Therefore, skin color is a product of evolutionary forces as human adapted to their environments and their skin adapt to the levels of radiation that they were receiving. The…...

Dinosaurs are a popular topic with young students of both genders and all ethnicities. Because they are extinct, dinosaurs generally take on a mythic character among children of this age; furthermore, because they are physically enormous and dominant, most students find them fascinating as almost fantasy creatures. Therefore, creating a thematic unit on dinosaurs for first and second graders was fun and rewarding. With the plethora of material available on the subject, tailoring a unit for my students also involved a thorough review of films, books, websites, and CD ROMs. I relied heavily on multimedia materials, as dinosaurs' main impact for students is visual and aural. I employed Internet and CD Rom sources in addition to picture books and a brief cartoon film. These visual tools proved engaging for most students, who would otherwise become bored with pure fact and data. I based the success of the lesson on the…...

components to the principle of uniformitarianism: the first is that the principles that can be applied to the Universe nowadays have always been applicable in the same manner. The second implies that these principles occur and are applicable everywhere in the Universe. With this in mind, if occasional catastrophic events such as the ones described have occurred in the past on Earth, they could occur again, in a similar manner, today or in the future. So, if the dinosaurs became extinct following a meteorite impact, another such impact could hit the Earth in a similar manner, leading to another large scale extinction.
Geologic processes include diverse ways in which the Earth's surface is modeled. These include soil erosion or desertification. If an area has been significantly eroded, this could lead to devastating floods. At the same time, other geologic processes can lead to tsunamis. As a consequence, it is obvious…...

Kotters 8-Step ApproachIntroductionWhen Eric Schlossers (2001) Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal hit the stands at the start of the 21st century, it sparked a new need for the fast food industry to reassess itself and make itself more appealing in the wake of the fallout of the books claims. One company that failed to take the publics newfound aversion for the baby-boomer industry was McDonaldsthe restaurant that received most of the books criticism and the restaurant that served as the focal point of the 2004 documentary Super Size Me. Other restaurants like Wendys revamped their menu, their look, and their strategy by introducing a fresher, more wholesome approach to food and food service, offering home style fries, more organic options and more variety in their meals. McDonalds on the other hand doubled down with its commitment to the status quo of fast food. Its stock,…...

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Associated Press. (2014). McDonald’s tries to change its image. Retrieved from  

Choi, C. (2014). McDonald’s is trying to shed its junk food image. Retrieved from  http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-is-trying-to-change-its-image-2014-8 

Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model. (2018). Retrieved from  https://www.toolshero.com/change-management/8-step-change-model-kotter/ 

Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. NY: Houghton Mifflin.

Sinek, S. (2010). How great leaders inspire action. Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 

Sutton, D. (2015). McDonald’s unhealthy image and why it can’t shake it. Retrieved from https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865628840/McDonalds-unhealthy-image-and-why-it-cant-shake-it.htmlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2727939/McDonalds-confronts-junk-food-image.html