What would a dinosaur game be without extinction-level disasters?

The end of the Cretaceous period is marked by a point in time when a huge portion of the species living on earth simply ceased to exist.  Actually, to be a bit more accurate — they stopped dieing.  Fossils of the dinosaurs and a number of the other plants and animals on earth no longer show up in digs beyond a certain point in the earth.  Scientists refer to this point in geologic history as the KT Boundary.

There is growing consensus that this massive extinction was caused by a large meteor from space that most likely landed in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, which would have cause massive tsunamis, a wall of fire, drastic climate change, and a blackening out of the sun, resulting in the death of most of the plant life on earth.  Dinosaur ecosystems would have fallen apart quickly, while smaller burrowing animals would have been able to survive on organic materials protected from the disaster.

But other elements may have contributed to the downfall of the dinosaurs.  Disease may have hardened their eggs, making babies unable to hatch.  The monolithic rise of the angiosperms (flowering and fruiting plants), which took over from the gymnosperms (ferns, conifers and the like — plants that reproduced with exposed seeds) may have disrupted the ecosystems.  Rat-like mammals may have almost genocidally eaten the eggs of certain species.  Other geologic factors may have played a part too: earthquakes, volcanoes, and changing atmospheric conditions could have contributed to the collapse of the planetary ecosystem.

In keeping with these theories, one of the themes of Venture Dinosauria is apocolypse.  The artwork above is from our concept artist, envisioning the end of days.  Click on it to see it full-size.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.