"Jeff" wrote in message
. ..
* 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?

Now you're just being insulting. Perhaps the teachers back then, rather
relying upon the most recent data, repeated what they had been told when
*they* were in school. How many elementary school teachers do you know who
are rocket scientists? The fact remains that the critter was called
"Brontosaurus" at least until 1974, we were taught that he dragged his tail,
and we were taught that they died out from "Gigantism."

You can apply today's theories and knowledge to the past as much as you
would like, but I attended public school in three states (Colorado, New
York, New Jersey), and distinctly remember being taught pretty much the same
thing in all of them. Were they wrong? Yup. That's my point, innit?

As for Gigantism killing the dinosaurs, the theory is making a comeback --
at least in some circles: http://www.dinoextinct.com/ . Will you now claim
that this website doesn't exist?