Why Aren't There Any More Dinosaurs?

Tell your kid About 65 million years ago an enormous asteroid collided with the earth and changed everything on the planet. The dinosaurs couldn't adapt and eventually died out, making way for new animals, ones that were better suited to this other climate.

What you should know "Dinosaurs are vivid proof that the world was once very different, which gets a child's imagination running wild," notes Matthew T. Carrano, Ph.D., curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "Dinosaurs can often hook kids into broader scientific concepts," he says, so take this opportunity to talk about, say, the environment or evolution. For example, explain that dinosaurs' fossils show that they were the ancestors of today's chickens, pigeons -- even ostriches.

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