* KLC Lewis wrote, On 4/4/2007 9:11 PM:
When I was a wee little lass in Elementary school, yea, even when I was
older and graduated from High School, the "concensus view" was that there
was, once upon a time, a critter called a "Brontosaurus," who lived in
marshes and dragged his tail. It was also the concensus view that this
critter, and those like him, died out because they "got too big."
No. That's a cute story, but fantasy. Although there were much
speculation as to what might have caused the extinctions, there was
certainly no consensus on the topic. To quote the Encyclopedia Britannica
from 1973:

"What caused this sudden extinction? The answer is not at all clear.
Temperature changes, epidemics, eating of dinosaur eggs by early mammals,
have all been suggested but are far from satisfactory."

Perhaps in your school system the teachers made up fairy tales; that could
explain a lot.

The Denver Public School System, in the 60's, was rated very highly. And
regardless what the Encyclopedia Britannica would say in the next decade,
the story I related was accurate.

I was at the local library today and wandered over to the "Dinosaur"
section. The books there were labeled with the publication date on
the spine, so it was easy to find the several books from the late
'50's through the '60's. For completeness, I also went up to the "old
reference" section and found an encyclopedia from 1967. Without
exception, they had the same information as the 1973 Britannica. For
example, "The Fossil Book," 1958, went on for several pages in a
section titled "The Puzzle of Extinction" with a discussion of the
various theories. They favored climate change triggered by some
unknown cause, but noted that no one had presented any complete theory
that fit the data. Without exception, every text presented this as a
mystery that maybe someday will be solved. This is how I remember the
subject being presented here in Boston, but secretly I favored the
egg-sucking mammal theory.

So the question now is, was the Denver School System incompetent back
then, or is KLC spinning a cute yarn?