What really wiped out the dinosaurs?
- added July 23, 2008
- 7 responses
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- rwylie
- added this
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Dinosaurs are the most successful creatures who have ever lived on Earth; dominating the Mesozoic era for an amazing 100 million years, they had apparently cracked the problem of how to survive on our hostile planet.
But what caused such a successful group of animals to, around 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, suddenly die out? (I should first point out that it is undoubtedly a good thing for us that they did!)
The debate as to what dealt such a collossal blow as to wipe out the dominant life form on our planet is a fierce one: some put it down to an asteroid impact (the most readily understandable theory to the layman, and hence the one most of us know about), but other theories include a massive volcanic erruption, or even a massive burst of radiation from the heavens.
But now a new theory, which claims to be able to explain all of the five great extinctions that we observe in the fossil record, has been published in the journal Nature.
It's autor, Shanan Peters, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that a sudden rise in sea level can explain not only the extinctions themselves, but furthermore which and why specific species went extinct. Perhaps surprisingly, he believes that a FALL in sea levels, which happened at around the time the dinosaurs died out, is responsible for their extinction.
We know that around 100 million years ago, there were shallow seas across most of Europe and part of North America: when these dissappeared, the effect would have been to make the adjacent land-masses, on which the dinosaurs lived, "suddently...hot and dry", Peters says.
Although the evidence of the massive Chicxulub crater, dated to around the time of the most recent mass extinction, is hard to dismiss, the fact that other craters of similar size are observed on Earth which do NOT correspond to an extinction, suggests that there is more to the story. Gradual changes in sea level, while not as immediate and, frankly, as interesting as an impactor, provide a realistic and testable theory for the nature of the regular extinctions which take place on Earth.
The bad news, for us in the present day, is that mass extinctions can be, and probably have been, caused by RISES in sea level, which have a much more direct effect on land animals!
The take home message: keep a close eye on the oceans.
But what caused such a successful group of animals to, around 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, suddenly die out? (I should first point out that it is undoubtedly a good thing for us that they did!)
The debate as to what dealt such a collossal blow as to wipe out the dominant life form on our planet is a fierce one: some put it down to an asteroid impact (the most readily understandable theory to the layman, and hence the one most of us know about), but other theories include a massive volcanic erruption, or even a massive burst of radiation from the heavens.
But now a new theory, which claims to be able to explain all of the five great extinctions that we observe in the fossil record, has been published in the journal Nature.
It's autor, Shanan Peters, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that a sudden rise in sea level can explain not only the extinctions themselves, but furthermore which and why specific species went extinct. Perhaps surprisingly, he believes that a FALL in sea levels, which happened at around the time the dinosaurs died out, is responsible for their extinction.
We know that around 100 million years ago, there were shallow seas across most of Europe and part of North America: when these dissappeared, the effect would have been to make the adjacent land-masses, on which the dinosaurs lived, "suddently...hot and dry", Peters says.
Although the evidence of the massive Chicxulub crater, dated to around the time of the most recent mass extinction, is hard to dismiss, the fact that other craters of similar size are observed on Earth which do NOT correspond to an extinction, suggests that there is more to the story. Gradual changes in sea level, while not as immediate and, frankly, as interesting as an impactor, provide a realistic and testable theory for the nature of the regular extinctions which take place on Earth.
The bad news, for us in the present day, is that mass extinctions can be, and probably have been, caused by RISES in sea level, which have a much more direct effect on land animals!
The take home message: keep a close eye on the oceans.
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Very Interesting
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- goldenways
- 2 months ago
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My image is pretty misleading, but I couldn't find any pictures of dinosaurs dying of heat exhaustion. I'm MS Painting one right now!
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Until now. -
WARNING! This is a Global Warming article disguised as an interesting dinosaur extinction piece.
I bet that it was all the cars and factories that the dinosaurs were using that caused the global warming catastrophe that brought about their extinction..... Oh wait...-
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- Abamanation
- 2 months ago
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I'll ignore your obvious ignorance of even the basics of what the article is about, as well as your barely concealed dislike of people who are serious about what we are doing to our planet.
This is primarily an interesting article about wide-scale exctinctions. If you read the article, which you obviously haven't (or at least haven't understood it) then the dinosaur extinction theory is for sea levels DECREASING. Where's the hidden global warming message in that? Einstein.
And PS, why does it matter HOW it happened in the past? Just because there weren't "cars and factories" then, doesn't mean that our cars and fatories aren't going to do bad things. -
Very interesting.. plusglobal warming happens anyways.. as well as global cooling... our cars and factories are just accellerating the process...
sorry for going off topic.. stupid hippies... anyways very interesting, would be good to see what they cpme up with never really thought the asteroid theory was that solid.
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