dinosaurs | Ask Dr. Universe | Washington State University

How did one comet kill all the dinosaurs? If crocodiles, snakes and birds came from dinosaurs, did it actually kill all of them? — Mya, 11.4, Virginia

October 12, 2023 melissamayer

Dear Mya,

It’s hard to imagine that one space rock wiped out the dinosaurs. But it did more than that. It killed 75% of the plants and animals on Earth. Me-OW.

I talked about that with my friend Barry Walker. He teaches geology classes about Earth’s history at Washington State University.

Walker told me that we call a space rock that hits Earth a meteorite. The meteorite that took out the dinosaurs set off changes on Earth. Those changes lasted for thousands of years. That’s how it killed so many things.

Did dinosaurs eat humans? – Brileigh, 10, North Carolina

March 2, 2023 melissamayer

Dear Brileigh,

If you looked inside a T. rex mouth, you’d see some 12-inch teeth. That’s longer than my tail!

I asked my friend Aaron Blackwell if dinosaurs used those big chompers on humans. He’s an anthropologist who studies human biology at Washington State University. He told me dinosaurs and humans didn’t live at the same time.

“Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago—before there were even primates,” Blackwell said. “So, they could never have eaten a human or even a monkey.”