![]() ![]() Starvation was another possibility: Large dinosaurs required vast amounts of food and could have stripped bare all the vegetation in their habitat. Some scientists believed a great plague decimated the dinosaur population and then spread to the animals that feasted on their carcasses. Another theory was that dinosaurs’ bodies became too big to be operated by their small brains. One early theory was that small mammals ate dinosaur eggs, thereby reducing the dinosaur population until it became unsustainable. Over the years, paleontologists have proposed several theories for this extensive die-off. (“K” is the abbreviation for Cretaceous, which is associated with the German word “Kreidezeit.”) Besides dinosaurs, many other species of mammals, amphibians and plants died out at the same time. Dinosaurs roamed the earth for 160 million years until their sudden demise some 65.5 million years ago, in an event now known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, extinction event.
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