Did dinosaurs go extinct 300,000 years AFTER the Chicxulub impact??
“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”
From the April 27 date I don't think that this is another hoax but I am going to need some convincing.(And I thought the Deccan Traps eruptions were virtually simultaneous with Chicxulub).
OTOH I believe Robert Bakker had similar thoughts.
The next best thing to seeing the "fighting dinosaurs' in Ulaan Bataar: a detailed series of photos.
Only, as I have said before, in UB you can TOUCH the fossils.
2 comments:
Bakker had a fairly convincing case; frogs and other animals that ought to be sensitive to the sort of worldwide nuclear winter the impact was supposed to cause in order to kill off the dinosaurs did not go extinct. At the same time, dinosaur diversity was at an all-time low, or so he argues, given the vagaries and finite resolution of the fossil record, I'm not sure how much confidence that statement can be made with.
And IIRC there were some other really big impacts during the Mesozooic. The dinosaurs were in control for a long time, so they would have survived some pretty hairy catastrophes before whatever it was at KT did them in.
I think maybe people don't want to admit that extinction just happens. They would rather think it takes something drastic and spectacular.
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