History Main / PhlebotinumKilledTheDinosaurs

* The [[ArtifactOfDoom Black Marker]] from ''Franchise/DeadSpace'' lore was found in the Chicxulub crater and is about 65 million years old. No way that's a coincidence.
** Technically it is a coincidence, but only in-universe. The [[spoiler:Brethren Moons]] fire off their Markers randomly with the intent of ''seeding'' life forms, not wiping them out. Humans didn't discover it until the year 2214.

Similarly fantastic theories have sometimes been suggested to explain why other species went extinct, though due to SmallReferencePools, most writers [[TheGreatestHistoryNeverTold tend to ignore]] the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event Permian–Triassic extinction]], which was the biggest mass extinction ever. The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic–Jurassic_extinction_event Triassic–Jurassic extinction]], which was almost as widespread as the Cretaceous–Paleogene and directly led to dinosaurs becoming the dominant forms of life for the next 135 million years, is even more obscure. Apparently, it's only the fall of the dinosaurs, and not their rise to prominence, that's deemed interesting enough for fiction. Despite the fact that both of these events have considerably more uncertainty about their causes (and thus more room to invent a Phlebotinum-based explanation) than the by this point rather well-understood Cretaceous–Paleogene.

Similarly fantastic theories have sometimes been suggested to explain why other species went extinct, though due to SmallReferencePools, most writers [[TheGreatestHistoryNeverTold tend to ignore]] the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event Permian–Triassic extinction]], which was the biggest mass extinction ever. The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic-Jurassic_extinction_event Triassic–Jurassic extinction]], which was almost as widespread as the Cretaceous–Paleogene and directly led to dinosaurs becoming the dominant forms of life for the next 135 million years, is even more obscure. Apparently, it's only the fall of the dinosaurs, and not their rise to prominence, that's deemed interesting enough for fiction. Despite the fact that both of these events have considerably more uncertainty about their causes (and thus more room to invent a Phlebotinum-based explanation) than the by this point rather well-understood Cretaceous–Paleogene.

Similarly fantastic theories have sometimes been suggested to explain why other species went extinct, though due to SmallReferencePools, most writers [[TheGreatestHistoryNeverTold tend to ignore]] the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event Permian–Triassic extinction]], which was the biggest mass extinction ever. The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic–Jurassic_extinction_event Triassic–Jurassic extinction]], which was almost as widespread as the Cretaceous–Paleogene and directly led to dinosaurs becoming the dominant forms of life for the next 135 million years, is even more obscure. Apparently, it's only the fall of the dinosaurs, and not their rise to prominence, that's deemed interesting enough for fiction. Despite the fact that both of these events have considerably more uncertainty about their causes (and thus more room to invent a Phlebotinum-based explanation) than the by this point rather well-understood Cretaceous–Paleogene.

* ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'' has the dinosaurs being killed off because of the fall of [[OutsideContextProblem Lavos]]. The world isn't Earth, but it's [[AllPlanetsAreEarthlike similar enough]] that this event occurred 65 million years ago like the actual extinction of the dinosaurs. For contrast, the rulers of said dinosaurs were [[LizardFolk bipedal and sentient]]. Lavos happened to land on their capital, killing the majority of them, and the resulting Ice Age finished the job.

** 1998's ''Film/RebirthOfMothra3'' places the blame on the Cretaceous version of [[Characters/GodzillaTheGhidorahs King Ghidorah]], who now plans to do the same to humanity by [[AdultFear devouring the life-energies of our children]].

* In the ''FanFic/DayOfTheBarneyTrilogy'', [[Series/BarneyAndFriends Barney and Baby Bop]] summoned the meteor that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago by singing "I love you, you love me." Believe it or not, this isn't the most heinous deed on their HistoricalRapSheet.
* In Creator/AAPessimal's ''Literature/GoodOmens'' fic ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5304252/3/I-shall-endure-to-the-end I Shall Endure to the End,]]'' the dinosaurs died out as a result of the Great Flood due to prioritization on Noah, Crowley and Aziraphale's parts -- there was just no way to fit a breeding pair of brontosauruses on the Ark, and the tyrannosaurs would have eaten out all the other animals by the time the trip was over, so they had to be left out.
* In ''Fanfic/MesozoicEffect'', the dinosaurs and their ancient civilization were wiped out by the Reapers, except for those who escaped in [[HumanPopsicle cryosleep]] in their [[ElaborateUndergroundBase bunkers]].
* ''FanFic/RiseOfTheGaleforces'' actually gives [[ShownTheirWork as close to the correct scientific explanation]] as the author -- and his AuthorAvatar -- is aware of, when he briefly interrupts the narrative to correct several other characters who thought that a heatwave killed off the dinosaurs.[[note]]While they weren't exactly wrong in a sense -- the blast front from the Chixiclub meteor impact is thought to have packed the same energy as 100 teratonnes of TNT (420 ZJ), over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- the original context referred to a heatwave produced by the sun. The food chain collapse that led to the extinction was because the dust from the impact ''blocked out'' the sun, causing most of the plant life to die out and take the food chain with it.[[/note]] Humorously, [[WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles Frozone]] later gets to make a jab at the infamous "Ice age" line from ''Film/BatmanAndRobin'', as noted below.
* According to ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11191235/88/Harry-Potter-and-the-Prince-of-Slytherin Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin,]]'' the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor summoned by [[spoiler:Magic itself to retroactively prevent the rise of the Naga, one of which would make their language inherently magical with [[ApocalypseHow devastating consequences]]. Magic then punished the responsible for it by trapping him forever in a cave, where he can only wait for visitors to grant them one wish, with the echoes of their language becoming Parseltongue (that Salazar Slytherin made hereditary for his descendants when he reached the Last Naga)]].

* In ''Film/BatmanAndRobin'', Mr. Freeze thinks the Ice Age killed the dinosaurs--a bit of a suspect statement coming from a scientist, even if paleontology isn't his field. [[ArtisticLicensePaleontology He is, of course, wrong]].

* In ''Film/ReignOfFire'', it was the [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons]] [[CoolVersusAwesome that killed]] the dinosaurs. Of course, scientists only learn of this too late to warn everyone of them.

* In ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'', [[HornyDevils Thomas Raith]] claims that [[PowerOfLove love killed the dinosaurs]]. Harry [[ArtisticLicenseBiology calls him out on it]]. Essentially, the tale talks about how the meteor did wipe out the big stuff, but the dinosaurs didn't regain their position because mammals could feel love and be devoted to their mates and offspring, making them more likely to survive. It should be noted this is a vampire folk tale being told to [[BookDumb a wizard with a GED]], and should be taken with a grain of salt, especially given that some dinosaurs did have strong nesting instincts.

* Played with in Michael Crichton's ''Literature/TheLostWorld1995'', in which Ian Malcolm makes a study on extinction and begins to debunk the theory of the dinosaurs being wiped out by a meteor. [[spoiler:Towards the end, they establish that any mistake or miscalculation in an ecosystem, no matter how small, can compromise the survival of an entire species.]]

** In the Literature/StarTrekTheLostEra novel ''The Buried Age'', the Permian extinction event is chosen instead -- it was a consequence of an artificially induced galaxy-wide disaster. The SufficientlyAdvancedAliens known as Manraloth accidentally caused the entire galactic population to AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence, releasing terrible amounts of energy which irradiated planets. In the aftermath, the artificially maintained habitats of the Manraloth degraded, destabilizing stars, among other dangerous side-effects. The galaxy was an irradiated hellhole until sapient life evolved again millions of years later.
* Creator/DavidDrake's ''Time Safari''. Human beings travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs, and of course most of these trips go back to the Late Cretaceous because everybody wants to bag a ''[[UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex T. rex]]''. You may think you know where this was going, but its subverted -- what actually does in the dinosaurs is a captive tyrannosaur that was re-released into the Cretaceous wild. Seems it was carrying a bird infection that it picked up while it was in the 20th century... Which makes [[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007288 this]] HilariousInHindsight.
* The entire novel ''Literature/TyrannosaurCanyon'' revolves around finding that ImportedAlienPhlebotinum killed the dinosaurs. [[spoiler:Specifically, that aliens sent a disease to wipe out the dinosaurs so mammals would diversify and eventually evolve into humans. Yeah...]]

* Creator/JackChalker's ''Literature/WellWorld'' series has it that when the universe was manually rebooted, a world was chosen for each of the races to get seeded upon. Earth came up almost perfect for humanity, but had developed dinosaurs naturally. So the Guardian tweaked the axial tilt of the world slightly, thus killing most of them off to make room for the incoming colonists. Needless to say, time was moving at an extremely fast pace during this -- only moments passed by during the process.

** And of course; dinosaurs are still alive and that’s why we have Nessie and Mkele Mbenbe.

* One of three alien races who commonly interact with Earth humans in TabletopGame/ConspiracyX are the "Saurians", mysterious reptilian aliens with many forms who want to take over. [[spoiler:They are actually the dinosaurs, they owned the planet long before us, and they had extremely advanced technology. What finally did them in was an experimental FTL drive that failed in the middle of a huge space civil war, trapping just about every single Saurian still alive at the time within the temporal stasis field around an artificial black hole. It took the black hole 65 million years to shrink to the point that some Saurian ships have managed to free themselves of its pull, and the crew members have discovered, to their great dismay, that while they were gone... all kinds of things happened to their planet.]]

* Now it's pretty certain that there ''was'' an asteroid impact that occurred right around the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction and that this was a significant contributor to the mass extinction event. A big reason this trope is still so pervasive is two fold. Firstly, there is still some ambiguity as to if the impact and resulting catastrophes did the gruntwork of the event itself or if it kicked off a chain reaction that did the majority of the ecosystem collapse. Secondly, while the asteroid impact hypothesis has been around since the 1980s, unambiguous support only sprung up in the following decades. Given many now-adult writers were children during this ambiguous period, you'll see this trope crop up more in their stories than youth tales which near unanimously point to the asteroid as the author might be under the impression the true cause of the extinction is still totally mysterious. The short of it is there was a mystery in the 1980s and early 1990s as to why the dinosaurs perished, but further findings have given reality significantly less wiggle room.
** Of course, dinosaurs aren't actually extinct: they survived in the form of birds. Next time you eat [chicken/turkey/duck/[[BreadEggsMilkSquick bald eagle]]], you will be eating an evolved dinosaur. What most people think of as dinosaurs are actually non-avian dinosaurs, which are quite extinct.

* According to one issue of the [[Magazine/RedDwarf Red Dwarf Smegazine]], it was the Dwarfers, who accidentally kill them all via a neutrino-tachyon shockwave when trying to get back to their own time (after having accidentally been sent back to this time period).

* ''Literature/TheQContinuum'' trilogy reveals that Q himself accidentally sent the iridium meteor to Earth during a titanic battle between members of the Continuum and four powerful beings (0, [[Recap/StarTrekS3E4AndTheChildrenShallLead Gorgan]], [[Recap/StarTrekS3E7DayOfTheDove (*)]], and [[Film/StarTrekVTheFinalFrontier The One]]). One of the latter supercharges the meteor and hurls it at female!Q. Fearing for her life, Q hurriedly creates a temporary wormhole in the meteor's path, not thinking about where the rock ends up. After the battle, the Continuum learns about the destruction of the dinosaurs and, as punishment, charges Q with protecting Earth and any lifeforms that evolve on it.

* In the Literature/StarTrekTheLostEra novel ''The Buried Age'', the Permian extinction event is chosen instead -- it was a consequence of an artificially induced galaxy-wide disaster. The SufficientlyAdvancedAliens known as Manraloth accidentally caused the entire galactic population to AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence, releasing terrible amounts of energy which irradiated planets. In the aftermath, the artificially maintained habitats of the Manraloth degraded, destabilizing stars, among other dangerous side-effects. The galaxy was an irradiated hellhole until sapient life evolved again millions of years later.

A subtrope of HistoricalInJoke and RealEventFictionalCause. See TheDinosaursHadItComing when the dinosaurs' extinction is blamed on themselves. Compare ArtisticLicensePaleontology, which this trope can fall into if not done well. Contrast with LostWorld, where the dinosaurs manage to duck and cover in a cave/valley/jungle before the big event. See also TheCretaceousIsAlwaysDoomed, which is about the tendency of time-travelers to arrive at dates of historical significance--''especially'' the end of the dinosaurs--by complete coincidence; that trope can overlap with this one if the reason they're present for the extinction is that they ''caused'' it.

* In the ''Manga/ThePrinceOfTennis'' movie ''The Two Samurai: The First Game'', the power of Tezuka Kunimitsu's technique, Tezuka Zone was visually compared to the meteor storm responsible of the extintion of dinosaurs, when he hits the tennis ball so strongly that it appears as if multiple giant tennis balls from space rain down on Earth and wipe out the dinosaurs, utterly "destroying" his opponent along with the creatures. And it was ''awesome''. [[MundaneMadeAwesome What do you mean it's not awesome?]]
* In one chapter of ''Manga/FrankenFran'', [[MadScientist Fran]] claims that the dinosaurs were too large and inefficient to survive so they evolved to be smaller and became birds, to try and justify her disbelief at how the MonsterOfTheWeek could even exist. [[ArtisticLicenseBiology She fails biology forever]] [[ArtisticLicensePaleontology and makes paleontologists cry]], but kudos to having a [[UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex T.rex with protofeathers]].

* The Manga version of ''Anime/SCryed'' shows that Kazuma accidentally killed the dinosaurs with one of his punches (that broke through the walls of space and time).

* In ''VideoGame/PredatorConcreteJungle'', it is said that the Predators exterminated the dinosaurs. [[CanonDiscontinuity This is ignored by virtually all other Predator works.]]

* In ''[[ComicBook/NineteenSixtyThree 1963: No One Escapes The Fury!]]'', the villain's opening line is, "Who killed the dinosaurs? ''I did!''" Given that he's a psychic living fossil T-rex, he can back that up.
* In one Disney Comic featuring Donald, Donald goes back in time and accidentally makes a second moon explode.
* In ''ComicBook/GodzillaRageAcrossTime'', the dinosaurs were killed out by a fight between Earth's Kaiju and a Xillian invasion that included [[Characters/GodzillaTheGhidorahs Kaiser Ghidorah]].

* In Creator/AAPessimal's ''Literature/GoodOmens'' fic ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5304252/3/I-shall-endure-to-the-end I Shall Endure to the End,]]'' the dinosaurs died out as a result of the Great Flood due to prioritization on Noah, Crowley and Aziraphale's parts--there was just no way to fit a breeding pair of brontosauruses on the Ark, and the tyrannosaurs would have eaten out all the other animals by the time the trip was over, so they had to be left out.

* In ''Film/ReignOfFire'', it was the [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons]] [[CoolVersusAwesome that killed]] the dinosaurs. Of course, scientists only learn of this too late to warn everyone of them.

* In ''Film/BatmanAndRobin'', Mr. Freeze thinks the Ice Age killed the dinosaurs--a bit of a suspect statement coming from a scientist, even if paleontology isn't his field. [[ArtisticLicensePaleontology He is, of course, wrong]].
* The opening narration for ''Film/NightOfTheComet'' states that the comet (which turns most animal life into red dust) last came close to Earth when the dinosaurs disappeared.
* In ''Film/KamenRiderJ'', the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to the parasitic lifeform Fog Mother who arrived on Earth to feed and spawn her offspring.

* In ''Film/PacificRim'' there's a deliberately-ambiguous statement that the dinosaurs were [[spoiler:either killed off by Kaiju, or were the first failed attempt at ''creating'' Kaiju.]]
* In ''Film/JupiterAscending'', the extinction of the dinosaurs was engineered by aliens because they were deemed too hostile to human life. Once they were gone, Earth was seeded for eventual harvesting.
* ''Film/PowerRangers2017'' has Zordon and the other ancient Rangers fighting Rita on Earth. In a last-ditch effort, Zordon has a meteor dropped on their location to stop her.
* Inverted in ''Film/SuperMarioBros'', with the meteorite that caused the dinosaurs' extinction splitting the world into parallel dimensions, one of which had the dinosaurs continue to thrive and evolve into sentient beings.

* In ''Literature/{{Monster}}'', BigBad Lotus mentions having to "undo" the dinosaurs because they were part of the [[spoiler:universe's master plan to destroy her]].

* The entire novel ''Literature/TyrannosaurCanyon'' revolves around finding that ImportedAlienPhlebotinum killed the dinosaurs. [[spoiler:Specifically, that aliens sent a disease to wipe out the dinosaurs so mammals would diversify and eventually evolve into humans. Yeah...]]
* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'':
** The MonsterOfTheWeek in ''Megamorphs #2'' causes the extinction of the dinosaurs by redirecting a meteor earthward. To rephrase it, the dinosaurs were killed by a plain old meteor... FLUNG BY ALIENS! To wipe out OTHER aliens who wanted to settle on Earth and [[HistoricalInjoke plant broccoli]]. For extra craziness, the benign alien settlers had a plan to divert the meteor with a nuclear missile, but it was sabotaged... [[BeenThereShapedHistory by one of the heroes]], because, well, [[IDidWhatIHadToDo that extinction was necessary for the human race to emerge]].
** The ''Ellimist Chronicles'' shows that the [[CosmicEntity titular character]] prevented [[GreaterScopeVillain Crayak]] from inflicting an [[EarthShatteringKaboom even worse]] disaster on Earth back when Mars still had life, but he intentionally did not interfere with the progress of an asteroid towards the planet because he saw more potential in those tiny mammals.
* Good ol' [[Creator/HPLovecraft Lovecraft]] actually subverts this trope. Apparently Cthulhu and his minions were the cause of the ''Permian'' extinction. [[labelnote:Note]] Since the permian extinction allowed dinosaurs to dominate the earth, this too is an [[InvertedTrope inversion]] [[/labelnote]]
** Some fanon sources claim Cthulhu was also responsible for wiping out the Dinosaurs, cause that would be [[RuleOfCool awesome]].
* Creator/DavidDrake's ''Time Safari''. Human beings travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs, and of course most of these trips go back to the Late Cretaceous because everybody wants to bag a [[UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex T.rex]]. You may think you know where this was going, but its subverted - what actually does in the dinosaurs is a captive tyrannosaur that was re-released into the Cretaceous wild. Seems it was carrying a bird infection that it picked up while it was in the 20th century... Which makes [[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007288 this]] HilariousInHindsight.
* Played with in Michael Crichton's ''Literature/TheLostWorld1995'', in which Ian Malcolm makes a study on extinction and begins to debunk the theory of the dinosaurs being wiped out by a meteor. [[spoiler:Towards the end, they establish that any mistake or miscalculation in an ecosystem, no matter how small, can compromise the survival of an entire species.]]

* In ''Literature/TheScienceOfDiscworld'', the Terribly Dull Lizards -- like many organisms from other time periods, very nearly including humans -- were indeed wiped out by a random and cataclysmic meteorite impact. It's still PhlebotinumKilledTheDinosaurs, because the reason there are so many rocks drifting around the solar system to ''become'' meteorites is because the UU student body had been tossing them at "The Target" (= Jupiter) as part of a cross-cosmic video game, and they never bothered to sweep up their unused ammunition.
* In Kage Baker's ''Literature/TheCompanyNovels'', a defective Immortal claims to have wiped out the dinosaurs through his abuse of time travel. However, he's also quite clearly insane, so it isn't certain if he's telling the truth.
* In the Literature/StarTrekTheLostEra novel ''The Buried Age'', the Permian extinction event is chosen instead -- it was a consequence of an artificially induced galaxy-wide disaster. The SufficientlyAdvancedAliens known as Manraloth accidentally caused the entire galactic population to AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence, releasing terrible amounts of energy which irradiated planets. In the aftermath, the artificially maintained habitats of the Manraloth degraded, destabilizing stars, among other dangerous side-effects. The galaxy was an irradiated hellhole until sapient life evolved again millions of years later.
* In ''Literature/DirkGentlysHolisticDetectiveAgency'', it's not the dinosaurs whose extinction is blamed on phlebotinum, but that of the dodo. A time-traveler indirectly caused it to be wiped out because he'd meddled with prehistory to save the coelacanth.

* Creator/JackChalker's ''Literature/WellWorld'' series has it that when the universe was manually rebooted, a world was chosen for each of the races to get seeded upon. Earth came up almost perfect for humanity, but had developed dinosaurs naturally. So the Guardian tweaked the axial tilt of the world slightly, thus killing most of them off to make room for the incoming colonists. Needless to say, time was moving at an extremely fast pace during this--only moments passed by during the process.

* The Creator/RykESpoor and Creator/EricFlint novel ''Literature/{{Boundary}}'' (and the sequels) also used the alien-directed asteroid projectile explanation (apparently in a civil war against bases on Earth).
* In ''Dracula Unbound'', the extinction of the dinosaurs was triggered by a nuclear bomb set off by time-travelers in order to wipe out a nest of vampires, which evolved from pterosaurs.
* The Steve Alten novel ''Literature/{{Domain}}'', the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was in fact [[spoiler:a spaceship of an evil multi-dimensional entity that was shot down by the good aliens, who then land on the planet (Earth), genetically mess with the local fauna to eventually create Humanity, create the Mayan civilization, and use its prophecies to foretell the end of the world which will happen when the bad alien's ship gains enough power to reactivate, on [[MayanDoomsday December 21, 2012]].]]
* The second book of ''Literature/EmpireOfTheAnts'' reveal Ants were responsible for the extinction of the Dinosaurs.

* Creator/RobertJSawyer's ''Literature/EndOfAnEra'' features time travelers who pop into the end of the Cretaceous to discover that Earth's gravity was purposefully modified by Martians in order to breed biological war machines (aka dinosaurs) against a fifth planet in the Solar System orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. [[spoiler:In the end, the scientists cause the KT Extinction Event by turning off the antigravity generators, simultaneously killing off both the dinosaurs and the Martians. Essentially, phlebotinum created the dinosaurs. Taking it away killed them.]]
* In ''Literature/CaptainUnderpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers'', [[spoiler:Tippy Tinkletrousers]] not only killed the dinosaurs with his nuclear bomb, but also caused the Ice Age ''and'' CausedTheBigBang.
* David Brin's ''Existence'' posits that a war between alien probes that took place millions of years in the past caused an object to fall to Earth and trigger the Cretaceous extinction. Whether it was an actual alien probe, a piece of rock flung by one of the probes at another, done on purpose or by accident, is not known.
* In the ''Literature/{{Tunnels}}'' series, [[spoiler:a Styx Phase killed off the dinosaurs, presumably triggering an environmental collapse that spelled doom for millions of other organisms that also went extinct.]]

* In the ''Literature/ZacharyNixonJohnson'' series, an alien race called the Gladians killed the dinosaurs because they were "getting uppity". They threaten to do the same to humanity in ''The Doomsday Brunette''.
* Played with in ''Literature/TheLivesOfTao''. The Dinosaurs were killed off by a large comet/asteroid-like object impacting the earth. It just that the object in question was [[AncientAstronauts a damaged alien spaceship crash landing on our planet]].

* In ''Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs'', Lisa Randall presents the hypothesis that dark matter (the source of gravity that holds galaxies and galactic clusters together, observable only due to its gravitational lensing, making it one of the Phlebotina of astrophysics) deflected the asteroid responsible for the dinosaurs' extinction.
* In ''Literature/FortunatelyTheMilk'', the protagonist learns early on that the dinosaurs actually had a technological civilization when he meets a time-traveling stegosaurus inventor (who is naturally rather interested to discover what happened in the intervening centuries to cause there to be no dinosaurs on Earth any more). The climax of the book features the revelation that the dinosaurs didn't die out, but invented space travel and took to the stars.
* From ''I, Cthulhu'' by Creator/NeilGaiman:
-->You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. [[JerkassGods In one barbecue.]]
* ''Literature/OfAntsAndDinosaurs'': A combination of the ants killing off the most important figures of dinosaur society and two antimatter weapons going off (anyone who could have reset the timer which prevents them from going off had been killed) killed them off in the end in this novel.

** In ''Series/PowerRangersDinoCharge'', an evil bounty hunter was in orbit over the planet with a large haul of asteroids he'd collected. But then his ship got bombed, causing them to break away and fall... Interestingly, the involvement of the {{Mac Guffin}}s that would go on to grant the Rangers' powers - stones that choose worthy wielders just like the Dino Gems - means ''this'' would make the perfect origin for the Dino Gems found among the asteroids. In the finale, [[spoiler:the Rangers go back in time to prevent this, meaning the dinosaurs never went extinct]]. This briefly caused a ContinuitySnarl, but later seasons established that ''Dino Charge'' is in a parallel universe compared to the series' main continuity.

* ''Series/TheXFiles'' two-parter "The Sixth Extinction" briefly skirts the topic of what killed the dinosaurs, suggesting that AncientAstronauts visited Earth five times before, destroying its dominant species and introducing new ones. The mammals (including us humans) are the latest masters of Earth, introduced after the "fifth extinction"--a.k.a. the Dinosaur Extinction Event. And our own time to go is [[JustBeforeTheEnd nearing fast]].

* One of three alien races who commonly interact with Earth humans in TabletopGame/ConspiracyX are the "Saurians", mysterious reptilian aliens with many forms who want to take over. [[spoiler:They are actually the dinosaurs, they owned the planet long before us, and they had extremely advanced technology. What finally did them in was an experimental FTL drive that failed in the middle of a huge space civil war, trapping just about every single Saurian still alive at the time within the temporal stasis field around an artificial black hole. It took the black hole 65 million years to shrink to the point that some Saurian ships have managed to free themselves of its pull, and the crew members have discovered, to their great dismay, that while they were gone... all kinds of things happened to their planet.]]

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' hints at this trope. There are enormous, dinosaur-like bones on the Northern Continent. You even run down one's spine in the final dungeon, which is where a cosmic horror meteor thing hit.
* ''VideoGame/XComTerrorFromTheDeep'' explained away the asteroid a crashed colony ship.

* One of the missions in ''[[VideoGame/{{Scribblenauts}} Super Scribblenauts]]'' is to cause the dinosaurs to go extinct [[InvokedTrope without asteroids or weapons]]. You have many options: plague, flooding, drought, a black hole, {{God}}, [[Franchise/CthulhuMythos Cthulhu]]...

* ''VideoGame/TheDayTheWorldBroke'': Osgood Jr., better known as Ozzie, a technician at the World Works, is responsible for the dinosaurs' disappearance. He accidentally started a cataclysm that killed some of them, and judged the best way to stop it was to throw the vents into reverse. In the process most of the remaining dinos, and some other Cretaceous critters, were sucked through into the core. Metals in the core wound up in their digestive systems, turning this first generation's hatchlings into biomechanical Mechanimals, who inhabit the core to this day.
* In ''VisualNovel/{{Demonbane}}'', Demonbane and Liber Legis begin randomly teleporting across time and space during their final battle. Eventually they end up back at Earth... 65 million years ago. Liber Legis does a super-charged body slam on Demonbane from orbit, causing both HumongousMecha to slam into the Earth at extreme speed... in the area that would eventually become known as the Yucatan Peninsula.
* ''VideoGame/{{Darkstalkers}}'' has a character, Huitzil, who was part of a series of robots made by Pyron to wipe the Earth clean of life. This was 65 million years ago. As such, they slaughtered the dinosaurs and went into hibernation, though they didn't realize they'd missed the lesser mammals...
* Averted with more or less every single fossil ''VideoGame/{{Pokemon}}'', since there isn't any mention of an extinction event 65 million years ago that killed off such critters as Aerodactyl or Tyrantrum ''en masse'' (and in fact, all the fossil Pokemon are stated to have originally existed 100 million years ago). Some of the FlavorText gives relatively plausible reasons for why certain specific fossil Pokemon went extinct, such as that Omastar's shell eventually became too heavy for it to catch prey.
* ''VideoGame/PlantsVsZombies2ItsAboutTime'': The player encounters and thwarts zomboss at multiple time periods, and at the end of the prehistoric level Jurassic Marsh, it's revealed that Dr. Zomboss is the one who sent a meteor to Earth.
* ''VideoGame/DeepTownMiningFactory'': It's revealed that the [[EldritchAbomination Elders]] you've been fighting throughout the game were beings [[spoiler:created by an ancient race, and were originally benevolent before their corruption by the Amber Elder's chaotic frequencies. The Ancients were reluctant to destroy their own creations and thus]] sealed them in an asteroid then sent it towards a planet with an iron core, which would imprison the Elders and their chaotic frequencies.

* In ''Webcomic/TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob'', the dragons had an atomic-level civilization during the late Cretaceous, which ended with a nuclear war using "iridium bombs" (explaining the iridium layer attributed to an asteroid strike). The remaining survivors reverted to a pastoral existence until [[HumansAreBastards those wacky knights showed up]].
* ''ComicStrip/ThePerryBibleFellowship'': In [[http://www.pbfcomics.com/55 one strip]], the psychic dinosaurs brings the end on themselves.

* One ''Webcomic/DinosaurComics'' [[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=997 guest comic]] has God throwing a meteor at the Earth after one too many complaints by a certain T. rex.
* According to ''Webcomic/RavensDojo'', Jesusaurus absolved them of their sins and they were all taken into heaven by the Rapture. Except for the sinful T-Rexes, doomed to burn eternally in engines built by primates.

* In ''Webcomic/SandraAndWoo'', the dinosaurs were indeed destroyed by a meteor. [[http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2016/03/03/0765-the-apprentice/ Accidentally summoned by Roc, god of birds, on his second day at the job.]]
* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'': A massive alien spaceship passed through a cometary halo, and their mass disrupted various orbits. Eight million years later, a very large rock came down on Earth, while the dinosaurs tried desperately to build a flying machine to escape. Played with in that they ''weren't'' actually killed; thanks to a probe left in orbit the aliens were able to pick up the dinosaurs' early radio transmissions and evacuated them in time. The "feather folk" have been residents on that same PlanetSpaceship ever since.

* It wasn't a meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, it was [[WebVideo/YuGiOhTheAbridgedSeries Tristan Timothy Taylor]]...

* Alternatively, in ''WebAnimation/{{Asdfmovie}}'', mine turtles [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI5_sQ8O-7Y killed the dinosaurs]].

* According to [[Wiki/SCPFoundation SCP-]][[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1050 1050]], a race of {{Eldritch Abomination}}s known only as '[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast The Destroyers]]' were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as ''virtually every other mass extinction'' in Earth's history.

* One episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheEmperorsNewSchool'' has Yzma combine a time machine, invisibility device and an evil [=MP3=] player (it only plays disco music!), which is then lost in time. It becomes a BrickJoke at the end of the episode when Kuzco flips the show to a documentary about dinosaurs, who begin dying off from the disco music.
* In ''WesternAnimation/SamuraiJack'', Aku falls to Earth in the form of a meteorite. Guess who happens to be in the blast radius when Aku hits.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'', Fry encounters a giant brain that knows ''everything''. The result is the page-quote above.
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddParents'', Wanda claims to have wiped out the dinosaurs the last time she "went bad." But she didn't -- it was [[NoCelebritiesWereHarmed Sylvester Calzone]] doing a species-wide NoHoldsBarredBeatdown.
-->'''Calzone:''' Uh, you're da species, and I'm da extinction!!
* In the two-part ''WesternAnimation/BionicSix'' episode "Back to the Past", the protagonists are sent back to find out what killed the dinosaurs. Naturally, they end up getting involved with it. The dinosaurs died from the radiation that leaked from the weapon taken to the past by villains sent there [[{{Irony}} to obtain the power that killed them]].
* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'': As a kid, Peter asks a museum tour guide why the dinosaurs died out:
-->'''Tour guide:''' [[ADateWithRosiePalms Because you touch yourself at night.]]

* In ''WesternAnimation/JonnyQuestTheRealAdventures'', the dinosaurs were wiped out by an incredibly powerful nuke, which an insane cult leader intended to use to wipe out humans instead. The heroes use a time machine to send it back 65 million years.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow'': In "Prehistoric Stimpy", Wilbur Cobb ends his rambling story about prehistoric life by telling the titular characters several ridiculous theories on how the dinosaurs died, including "They thought they were Franchise/{{Superman}}, and jumped off buildings." He finally claims that ''he'' was the one who killed the dinosaurs... as he's being taken away by security guards, who reveal that he's not a guide but a lowly bone-polisher.
* In a time travel-themed episode of ''WesternAnimation/IAmWeasel'', the dinosaurs [[NakedPeopleAreFunny laughed at I. R. Baboon's red butt]] so hard that they fell off the world (which was flat at that time period for some odd reason) and to their deaths. Weasel calls him out at first, but then realizes that dinosaurs are supposed to go extinct and instead takes this as a sign that [[YouAlreadyChangedThePast Baboon was destined to correct history]].

* Inverted in ''WesternAnimation/BackToTheFutureTheAnimatedSeries''. In the episode "Forward to the Past" (and its comic book adaptation), Doc travels to the Cretaceous period to test his new disintegrator device in seclusion. He happens to arrive just as The Meteor is about to crash, so he reflexively [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong disintegrates it]]. When he returns to the present, he discovers that the dinosaurs never went extinct and remained the dominant species on Earth, complete with dino-Hill Valley and dino-Biff Tannen. To avoid getting erased from history, he has to go back and [[SetWrongWhatWasOnceMadeRight put the meteor back in the sky]]. Essentially "Phlebotinum ''saved'' the dinosaurs... ''then'' killed them".

''Literature/OfAntsAndDinosaurs'': A combination of the ants killing off the most important figures of dinosaur society and two antimatter weapons going off (anyone who could have reset the timer which prevents them from going off had been killed) killed them off in the end in this novel.

* In ''WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug'' "Style Queen", we learn that Plagg, the cat-like kwami of destruction, was responsible for making the dinosaurs go extinct. And also sinking Atlantis.

* In ''Series/{{Dinosaurs}}'' the dinosaurs drove ''themselves'' to extinction when the construction of a wax fruit factory causes a chain reaction that leads to a new ice age that will kill off the dinosaurs. For those that want the chain: [[spoiler:the factory was built on the breeding grounds of the bunch beetles, which caused them to go extinct, which means the vines they feed on grow unchecked. Trying to use herbicide to kill them off causes all the other plants to die off as well, causing global warming. Trying to check that by creating clouds leads them to bomb volcanoes, which creates ash clouds that block out the sun, which causes a new ice age that will last for tens of thousands of years. And the worst part is that Richfield, who was behind most of the above, doesn't even care that he doomed the world because he's making an immense profit from it.]

* In ''Series/{{Dinosaurs}}'' the dinosaurs drove ''themselves'' to extinction when the construction of a wax fruit factory causes a chain reaction that leads to a new ice age that will kill off the dinosaurs. For those that want the chain: [[spoiler:the factory was built on the breeding grounds of the bunch beetles, which caused them to go extinct, which means the vines they feed on grow unchecked. Trying to use herbicide to kill them off causes all the other plants to die off as well, causing global warming. Trying to check that by creating clouds leads them to bomb volcanoes, which creates ash clouds that block out the sun, which causes a new ice age that will last for tens of thousands of years. And the worst part is that Richfield, who was behind most of the above, doesn't even care that he doomed the world because he's making an immense profit from it.]]

* In one chapter of ''Manga/FrankenFran'', [[MadScientist Fran]] claims that the dinosaurs were too large and inefficient to survive so they evolved to be smaller and became birds, to try and justify her disbelief at how the MonsterOfTheWeek could even exist. [[ArtisticLicenseBiology She fails biology forever]] [[ArtisticLicensePaleontology and makes paleontologists cry]], but kudos to having a [[TyrannosaurusRex T.rex with protofeathers]].

* Creator/DavidDrake's ''Time Safari''. Human beings travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs, and of course most of these trips go back to the Late Cretaceous because everybody wants to bag a [[TyrannosaurusRex T.rex]]. You may think you know where this was going, but its subverted - what actually does in the dinosaurs is a captive tyrannosaur that was re-released into the Cretaceous wild. Seems it was carrying a bird infection that it picked up while it was in the 20th century... Which makes [[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007288 this]] HilariousInHindsight.

* ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'' has the dinosaurs being killed off because of the fall of [[OutsideContextProblem Lavos]]. The world isn't Earth, but it's [[AllPlanetsAreEarthlike similar enough]] that this event occurred 65 million years ago like the actual extinction of the dinosaurs. For contrast, the rulers of said dinosaurs were [[TheReptilians bipedal and sentient]]. Lavos happened to land on their capital, killing the majority of them, and the resulting Ice Age finished the job.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Nobilis}}'' features a vignette where a representative of Heaven, an aspect of perfection and purity, descends onto Earth for the first time... and then a dinosaur craps on him. So they have to go. [[AGodAmI This is par for the course in Nobilis]].

* ''VideoGame/DeepTownMiningFactory'': Throughout the game, it's revealed that the [[EldritchAbomination Elders]] you've been fighting were beings [[spoiler:created by an ancient race, and were originally benevolent before their corruption by the Amber Elder's chaotic frequencies. The Ancients were reluctant to destroy their own creations and thus]] sealed them in an asteroid then sent it towards a planet with an iron core, which would imprison the Elders and their chaotic frequencies.

* Good ol' [[Creator/HPLovecraft Lovecraft]] actually subverts this trope. Apparently Cthulhu and his minions were the cause of the ''Permian'' extinction.

* Now it's pretty certain that there ''was'' an asteroid impact that occurred right around the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction and that this was a significant contributor to the mass extinction event. A big reason this trope is still so pervasive is that there is two fold. Firstly, there is still some ambiguity as to if the impact and resulting catastrophes did the gruntwork of the event itself or if it kicked off a chain reaction that did the majority of the ecosystem collapse. Secondly, while the asteroid impact hypothesis has been around since the 1980s, unambiguous support only sprung up in the following decades. Given many now-adult writers were children during this ambiguous period, you'll see this trop crop up more in their stories than youth tales where near unanimously point to the asteroid. The short of it is there was a mystery in the 1980s and early 1990s as to why the dinosaurs perished, but further findings have given reality significantly less wiggle room.