Meteors do not destroy all dinosaurs

US scientists have found evidence that dinosaurs continue to live another 300,000 years after an asteroid hit the earth.

Dinosaurs, birds and many mammals suddenly disappeared 65 million years ago.Photo: Daily Mail.

The hypothesis of a dinosaur extinction due to a collision between the earth and a giant meteorite 65 million years ago was proposed by physicist Luis Walter Alvarez in 1980. He suggested that the collision created a large hole named after Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Geophysicist Glen Penfield found Chicxulub on a search for oil dating to about 65 million years, coinciding with the time of dinosaurs extinction.

Even so, Alvarz's hypothesis has become a controversial topic for years. Some scientists believe that dinosaurs disappear by other causes, such as volcanic activity or climate change. They only agreed on one point: 70% of species (both animals and plants) disappeared 65 million years ago because of a disaster.

Analysis of soil samples from a hole with a diameter of nearly 180 km indicates that the collision occurred 300,000 years before the dinosaurs became extinct. Proponents of the meteorite hypothesis suggest that earthquakes or tsunamis have disturbed the sediments of Chicxulub pits, making dating of soil samples impossible to achieve accurate results.

But Professor Gerta Keller, a paleontologist from Princeton University (USA), thinks that this explanation is unreasonable. "Sedimentation occurs for a long time. Earthquakes or tsunamis cannot create such sediments," Keller said.

Recently, a number of paleontologists from the US Geological Survey analyzed the dinosaur bones found in the San Juan, New Mexico basin to find out the problem. Based on the analysis and the age of the boulders buried in the bones, they assumed that the dinosaurs still lived after the meteorite hit the globe.

Another remarkable thing is that among the fossils there is a group of 34 bones lying together. 'Apparently 34 bones belong to an animal. If a river pulls them out of the rock, they will be scattered everywhere, but they cannot be clumped in one place, 'said Jim Fassett, team leader.