Question: Why do you like fossils? Why did the dinosaurs die?

Thomas Clements answered on 13 Mar 2015:

Great question!

I love fossils because they tell us a lot of really important things!

So when I find a fossil (lets say dinosaur). I can tell where it lived. The rock it is in tells us what the world like back then. The fossil itself can tell us how big it was, was it a boy or girl, could it run fast, what did it eat, was it healthy, could it see well, was it smart? Now we can even start to tell what colour they were!

In answer to the second part of your question it is most likely due to a meteorite that hit what is now mexico. The explosion would have been so massive that dust would have blanketed the whole world and whilst it was in the atmosphere, it blocked out the sun. When the plants can’t photosynthesise any more they begin to die, causing plant eating dinos to die. This in turn means there is no food for the predators and the dinos were driven to extinction. The technical term for this is a trophic (food chain) collapse.