Without a meteorite disaster, dinosaurs are still extinct

Recently scientists from the University of Reading (UK) have rejected the hypothesis if no meteorite falls on Earth, dinosaurs will continue to proliferate. In fact, the number of dinosaurs has declined long before the Chicxulub meteorite disaster happened.

This finding will put an end to the controversy surrounding dinosaurs for many years, while helping us understand what happened at the last moment when dinosaurs still exist.

Chris Venditti - one of the researchers said: "One of the most controversial things about decades of dinosaurs is that they are prospering when meteorites fall, or before that the number has dropped and even Only extinct ".

Earth has experienced many large geological changes, even without meteorites, dinosaurs will still become extinct.

To clarify the problem, Venditti and colleagues analyzed fossil data to create the development branch of three major dinosaurs: ornithischians, theropods (zooplankton like T-rex). ) and sauropods (lizard-hip dinosaurs, represented as long-necked dinosaurs). They said the number of dinosaurs began to decline sharply around 24 million years before the meteorite disaster occurred. The peak is about 90 million years ago, the number of disappearing dinosaurs is much higher than newly born species. This is the beginning of a long-term extinction and meteorite disaster is just one of the triggers of this process. So if a meteorite disaster does not occur, dinosaurs will still be extinct.

Scientists also give an explanation as to why dinosaurs have disappeared on their own. That is because the Earth has many large geological changes. The two super continents of the Earth have been separated, the sea level fluctuated abnormally. In addition, geologist Gerta Keller believes that highly active super volcanoes are also the initial reason why many terrestrial and marine dinosaurs become extinct. The habitat of giant dinosaurs is narrowed, making them difficult to keep up with the speed of evolution and easy to be wiped out by natural disasters.

Extinction is a long process, often taking more than 1 million years, 75% of all species on Earth are destroyed. And many catastrophes can kill such a large number of species on Earth. So the cause of extinction of dinosaurs is our Earth. Geological fluctuations, changes in tectonics have gradually killed dinosaurs for a long time. And disasters only accelerate the extinction process.