Chicxulub Asteroid: Took Out Most Dinosaurs and Majority of Land & Sea Species

 

Imagine this guy roaming Earth all these years

Fantastic dinosaur story here … I love ‘em. This one comes from Business Insider with this headline:

“The dinosaurs may have already been going extinct before the cataclysmic space rock hit Earth, new findings suggest”

Introduction from the story:

   · A 6-mile-wide space rock (The Chicxulub asteroid) struck Earth 66 million years ago dooming the dinosaurs.

   · But some dinosaurs had already started to go extinct before another impact (2^nd impact), research now suggests.

  · An era of global cooling that started 76 million years ago may have prompted that decline.

It's tempting to ponder what life on Earth might have looked like had that asteroid not hit Earth some 66 million years ago. 

That impact in present-day Mexico doomed the dinosaurs and a majority of land and marine species. So, in its absence, would humans and other mammals have eventually duked it out with T. rex and triceratops? The answer is probably not, according to a recent study.

That research found that six major groups of dinosaurs were slowly going extinct over the 10 million years prior to the crash. 

The asteroid's impacts consequences were: mile-high tsunamis, raging fires, and a choking cloud of thick dust and sulfur that blotted out the sun. That was the final nail in the dinosaurs' coffin.

Fabien Condamine, a research scientist at the University of Montpellier in France, and who co-authored the new study, told Insider: “The meteorite is seen as a coup de grâce for dinosaurs, which finished them off.” 

He and his collaborators suggest that a period of global cooling may have contributed to a decline in the overall number of dinosaur species, which then made it impossible for the animals to recover after the cataclysmic event.

Condamine further said: “Many paleontologists think dinosaurs would have continued to live if the asteroid did not hit Earth. Our study brings new information for this question, and it seems that dinosaurs were not in good shape before the impact.”

Because they were in fact on their way out – this fine article continues here.

My 2 cents: I love this kind of Earth stories about that kind of life long before humans evolved so many millions and millions of years ago. No substitute for good history, right? I really like these historical stories about our planet, and I hope you do, too.

Thanks for stopping by.