As my research into these creatures continues I’ve been learning a lot. As I do, I’m increasingly bothered by people calling outdated individuals or devices “Dinosaurs”, insisting that given the choice of evolve or perish the dinosaurs chose the latter. This simply is not the case.

First; dinosaurs lasted for 150 million years. We’re not even close to that. During those 150 million years the dinosaurs evolved from a single small bipedal carnivore into giant four-legged sauropods, tyrannosaurus, and raptors. Dinosaurs knew plenty about evolving.

Second, their extinction is still actually a mystery. While the K-T impact definitely did occur and have a worldwide effect, there are no Pompeii-esque finds or any finds at all for that matter that coincide with the timing of the impact.

Third, whatever “killed the dinosaurs” didn’t exclusively kill dinosaurs or all of the dinosaurs. It killed all the large creatures. Descendants of velociraptor survived to become birds.

Although not as catchy, I’d like to point out that sharks, scorpions, turtles and alligator-like creatures are indeed “living fossils” that didn’t evolve any adaptations except to the atmosphere. They didn’t evolve but they didn’t go extinct either. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?

In light of today’s tragic announcements from RIM, I’m sure a lot of people are calling them Dinosaurs who didn’t evolve after being dealt an asteroid by Apple and Google. It’s not like that at all. RIM is more like neanderthals being wiped out by the much smarter homo sapiens (neanderthals are not our cousins and are in fact evolutionary dead ends).

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My belief regarding dinosaur extinction is that biodiversity in the late cretaceous was simply too low with too many large animals.