About 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs became extinct, leaving only a few descendants. just the birds they are in fact today the heirs of these giants who reigned over the continents and oceans of the globe for more than 180 million years.
This mass extinction is known as the Late Cretaceous Biological Crisis or Cretaceous-Tertiary Crisis. Its exact causes are still little known, although it is generally presented as the result of the fall of an important asteroids or massive volcanic eruptions in what is now called the Deccan Traps.
Two natural disasters that would therefore have combined to wipe out all dinosaur species. But did this extinction occur suddenly, as scientists often suggest? images of the devastation of an asteroidor did it spread much more over time?
Dinosaurs already in bad shape long before the asteroid hit
For researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, there are no doubts. The second option would be the most realistic. In fact, the dinosaurs would have suffered a long decline before finally disappearing.
If the paleontological data shows that, during the last million years that marks the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs were still present all over the world, we cannot say that they were in very good shape! Indeed, it would seem that its population was no longer very diversified, and that long before the fall of the Chicxulub asteroid.
This is reported by Chinese researchers in an article published in the journal PNAS. To reach this conclusion, they studied in detail more than 1,000 dinosaur egg fossils found in central China, dating back to the last two million…
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