Rising oxygen levels helped dinosaurs thrive

[Still Waters]

Scientists have found that increasing oxygen levels are linked to the rise of North American dinosaurs around 215 M years ago. A new technique for measuring oxygen levels in ancient rocks shows that oxygen levels in North American rocks leapt by nearly a third in just a couple of million years, possibly setting the scene for a dinosaur expansion into the tropics of North America and elsewhere. This is presented in a Keynote talk at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry conference, in Barcelona.

The US-based scientists have developed a new technique for releasing tiny amounts of gas trapped inside ancient carbonate minerals. The gases are then channelled directly into a mass spectrometer, which measures their composition.

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-dinosaurs-linked-oxygen.html