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About 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs’ dominance of the planet came to a fiery end when a 10-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth off the coast of Mexico. The change triggered a drastic change in temperature that saw a lot of garbage plowing through the atmosphere for hundreds of years, excluding the Light.
As a result, the dinosaurs became extinct, giving way to tiny creatures that would eventually conquered the planet.
It was largely assumed that when the comet was just the icing on the cake when it came to the disappearance of the dinosaurs, as scholars had claimed they were still dying. But a recent study finds the opposite.
A study from the University of Bath and the Natural History Museum showed that if it weren’t for the comet, dinosaurs would have been able to “thrive” on Earth. The researchers published their findings in the journal The Royal Society Open Science Tuesday.
Dinosaurs could have thrived today
The researchers studied the evidence of several separate dinosaur family trees and used mathematical models to see if they survived until the asteroid attack.
They learned that dinosaurs were thriving and showed no sign of letting go of their global supremacy.
“What we found is that dinosaurs were still dominant, they were still widespread and still doing very well,” said Joe Bonsor, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum.
“If the asteroid impact had never happened, then they could not have become extinct and would continue,” he added Bonsor.
Some dinosaurs were going better than others, like the hadrosaur and “flourishing” ceratopsiani with horns.
These dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurs, were victims of large predators.
More supportive studies are needed
The study suggests that previous studies have achieved this inference by modeling dinosaur family trees based on previous fossil records, DailyMail reported.
Based on the fossil record, experts believed the dinosaurs were dying out. However, not everything that dies becomes fossilized. Then, the team had to look at the family trees of the larger dinosaurs and extrapolate the results.
“Previous studies by others have used various methods to [conclude] that dinosaurs would have died anyway, because they were in decline in the late Cretaceous period “, said Bonsor.
The lack of evidence may also imply a reduction of biodiversity, although this does not represent the truth at the time.
The whole aspect of what we’re thinking is that we have not enough evidence to determine what happened to the dinosaurs in both cases. Instead, we have seen that no clear evidence remains that they are dying.
Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, told CNN in an email that the research likely introduces the largest dataset of evolutionary dinosaur trees ever and uses systematic techniques. to examine diversification rates towards the end of the Mesozoic.
He noted that the study added weight to the claim that before the asteroid hit, non-avian dinosaurs were abundant, not dwindling.
“This is how the dinosaurs ended up, not with a whine but with a bang,” Chiarenza said.
READ ALSO: Species of armored dinosaurs 75 million years found in Montana named after the character in Ghostbusters, Zuul
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