Tyrannosaurus rex Blamed For Extinction

Before the asteroid impact explanation took hold in the 1980s, scientists floated some truly strange ideas to explain why dinosaurs vanished. In 1925, paleobotanist George Wieland suggested that Tyrannosaurus rex may have eaten so many eggs that dinosaurs wiped out their own last generation before it could hatch. Then in 1939, paleontologist Percy Raymond proposed that dinosaur brains had shrunk over time until the animals became too stupid to survive. Those theories eventually collapsed, and the impact hypothesis rose instead after 1980, when new evidence tied the extinction to a massive extraterrestrial strike.

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