What Killed the Dinosaurs?

Overall, I saw this as a very interesting article that asked me to think about an event that I do not really think about as much. The article stated the extinction of the dinosaurs to be a 'mass murder', and I found that to be a simple, yet thought provoking way to put it.

A part that struck my interest was in the very beginning when Sumner states, "Life may already have been in trouble." This sentence interested me because in the widespread argument of what killed the dinosaurs the spectrum stretches as far as scientific proof and extends out to religious roots as well. It is easy to forget that while scientists and scholars search for evidence to support their hypotheses, life happened around the dinosaurs either way. This simple statement caused me to think about the nature around the creatures that impacted their ecosystems and survival. Changing temperatures are effects of nature that they could not have avoided. Sumner continues by explaining how the oceans were acidifying and the life that thrived in those conditions could have already been dying even before the mass extinction happened. In another section, he also mentions the lack of sunlight and the effects that it could have has on its wildlife—these are both circumstances that dinosaurs could not avoid.

While I learned about many of the efforts that scientists have taken to explain this event, I have also been brought to understand that with whatever did cause dinosaurs to go extinct, life around them was still happening, and that is an explanation in itself.