8 years ago
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Dinosaurs weren’t driven to extinction by that meteorite after all
It's the most dramatic mass extinction in the history of Earth. About 66 million years ago, a giant meteorite smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending toxic gases into the atmosphere and causing extreme climate change that wiped out most dinosaurs. Except that's not the whole story. Mass extinction, like modern love, is complicated. A new study from a group of UK researchers reveals that most dinosaur clades were already in...
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http://arstechnica.com
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This is interesting, but also has a massively misleading headline. The message of the article is, basically, that dinosaurs were declining already for over 20 million years before the meteorite hit. The Chicxulub event is something that killed species in a matter of days, maybe months. We're talking vastly different time scales here. Even if it's true that dinosaurs might have been on the way to extinction (and on a scale of millions of years, they would have had plenty of time to adapt) sayjng that the impact didn't cause the extinction of dinosaurs because they were already in decline is like saying that the shot to the heart didn't really kill you because you were already on your way to dying eventually anyway.