Palaeontology

Asteroid firestorm didn't kill the dinosaurs

By T.K. Randall
January 24, 2015 ·  15 comments

An asteroid if believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Image Credit: NASA/Don Davis While there is little doubt that the massive asteroid that plowed in to our planet at the end of the Cretaceous era was the primary contributing factor in the disappearance of the dinosaurs, the exact mechanism through which the space rock brought about their demise continues to remain a matter of some debate.

Conventional theories depict a planet bathed in a widespread inferno hot enough to ignite vegetation and wipe out most of the Earth's inhabitants within a short space of time.

Dr Claire Belcher and her team at Exeter University however have a different theory.By analyzing the effects of a heat furnace on living and non-living plant materials the scientists were able to determine that the asteroid impact would not have been hot enough to have caused such a widespread conflagration and that it is a lot more likely that the dinosaurs were instead wiped out over an extended period of time in the bitter winter conditions that inevitably followed.

"We're not saying that an asteroid didn't wipe out the dinosaurs, only that it probably didn't cause the global firestorms that many people assumed had happened as a result of the impact," she said.

"This flips our understanding of the effects of the impact on its head and means that palaeontologists may need to look for new clues from fossils found a long way from the impact to better understand the mass extinction."

Source: Independent | Comments (15)

Tags: Dinosaurs, Extinction, Asteroid