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Asked by to Rebecca, Heather, Ditte, Dave, Ben on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Ben White answered on 17 Jun 2014:
There’s many theories as to what caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, and I quite like yours!
While it may be difficult to prove if all dinosaurs had a bad flu or something similar, we know they likely did get infections and also cancers; from fossil records.
There were also certainly viruses around close to when dinosaurs walked the earth.
We know this because we can find where viruses have been in our genome (as viruses insert themselves into it to replicate) for more than 40 million years (dinosaurs died out ~65 million years ago).Scientists have recently been able to ‘revive’ a giatnvirus from 30,000 years ago: http://www.nature.com/news/giant-virus-resurrected-from-30-000-year-old-ice-1.14801
I wouldn’t worry though, as this giant virus only attacks amoebae.
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Rebecca Gladstone answered on 17 Jun 2014:
As Ben says it is difficult to prove what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and it was likely lots of things all at once.
I am sure that you can name many different types of dinosaurs and even describe what they look like! They came in many shapes and sizes.
Viruses are often specific to different types of animal, the viruses that make us sick are usually slightly different even to those in closely related animals like chimpanzees, gorillas and monkeys.
Sometimes virsus can move from one type of animal to another but first the virsus has to enter the cells, often differences in cells between animals means they can’t get in. There were so many types of Dinosaurs a single virsus might not have been able to make them all sick if they had slightly dfferent cells, being different can help us survive such an event.
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Ditte Hedegaard answered on 18 Jun 2014:
I agree with Ben and Rebecca’s answers.
Because viruses are so primitive in their structure, they are likely to have been the first creatures on our planet and were here long before the dinosaurs. I’m quite convinced that dinosaurs had viruses, bacteria and parasites just like human, animals and plants have them today. Whether or not they caused the extinction of dinosaurs is more difficult to answer. Some viruses are very unstable outside the living body and it can be very difficult to get hold of virus genes from old material.
If you do find some genes from the dinosaurs fossils the next challenge will be to find out if the genes belong to the dinosaur or from a virus or bacteria. Luckily we have super computers to help us identify the genes, but it can still be quite tricky. Not all viruses are deadly, so even if you found virus genes in the dinosaur fossils the scientists would have to recreate the virus and test how dangerous it is in a laboratory. There are a lot of laws about which viruses scientists are allowed to recreate, so it might be difficult to investigate whether the particular virus would have wiped out the dinosaurs.
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Dave Baker answered on 19 Jun 2014:
Could be one cause like a virus however it was probably more complicated. Transference of the virus would have been difficult because of their numbers and distances between the populations. I reckon climate change was probably the most plausible cause! Cheers.
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