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About 66 million years ago, the reign of the dinosaurs on Earth came to a fiery end when a 10-mile-wide asteroid hit Earth off the coast of Mexico. The impact caused dramatic climate change, which saw tons of debris plowed into the atmosphere, blocking the sun for hundreds of years.
As a result, the dinosaurs went extinct, giving way to small mammals that would eventually continue to dominate the planet.
It was largely thought that the asteroid was just the icing on the cake when it came to the extinction of the dinosaurs, as researchers believed they were already dying, but a new study has found otherwise.
Research from the University of Bath and the Museum of Natural History found that dinosaurs may have continued to “thrive” on Earth if it weren’t for the asteroid.
Scientists analyzed data from several dinosaur family trees and used statistical models to see how they were performing before the asteroid attack.
They found that the dinosaurs were thriving and showed no sign of giving up their dominion over the planet.
Joe Bonsor, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum, said: “What we found is that dinosaurs were still dominant, they were still widespread and they still do very well.
“If the impact with the asteroid had never happened, they might not have gone extinct and would have continued.”
Some dinosaurs in particular were doing better than others, such as hadrosaurs and horned ceratopsis, which were “thriving”.
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Bonsor said, “We show that if you expand the dataset to include newer dinosaur family trees and a larger set of dinosaur types, the results don’t really all point to this conclusion, in fact only about half do.
“Lack of data can often show species decline, but this may not be a reflection of reality at the time.
“The main point of what we’re saying is that we don’t have enough data to know what would have happened to the dinosaurs either way.
“Instead we have shown that there is no clear evidence that they are dying.
“Indeed some groups were thriving and there is no evidence to suggest they would have died around that time had the extinction event not happened.”
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