For homeowners and dinosaurs, location is everything. When you buy a house, for your long-term happiness, it’s better to find a neighborhood close to your work location than to have an extra living room. If you are a Cretaceous dinosaur, it's better to have a huge asteroid hit the center of the ocean rather than just near the Mexican coast.
If that meteor appears after half a minute, it will hit the Atlantic Ocean or somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Any position will produce some killer waves (literally), but at least it won't kill that many dinosaurs. Birds are cool and it might be nice to have some small raptors running around instead of chickens. Anyway, they are about the same size, so if we put them a little higher, they won't reach the door handle. The new discoveries were revealed in the BBC documentary The Day of the Dinosaurs, featuring scientists who have been drilling into the underwater crater. Back in 2016, geophysicist Jo Morgan of Imperial College London Sean Gulick of the University of Texas drilled deep into the seabed to learn more about the impact. Since then, they have been analyzing the samples they brought back. The team gave several speeches at the March 2017 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, but surprisingly, the news didn’t really spread until their discovery entered mainstream television.
Before we learn more details, it is important to note that there is no evidence of causality here. One of the main theories for mass extinction of non-birth dinosaurs is that (at least once) the mass impact event has resulted in a series of catastrophic consequences that have destroyed the largest flora and fauna. But it happened 66 million years ago. The history of Chicthulub Crater near the Mexican coast dates back to the same era, so the timeline matches, but it is still just scenario data. The theory of influence is not the only one. Paleontologists do not all agree that the Cicthulub crater is the culprit of mass extinction, although the data does strongly support the impact theory.
So, suppose that in fact there was a big impact killing most dinosaurs, the meteor hitting the Yucatan Peninsula near , where it can freely raise dust from evaporated rocks and sulfur dioxide . Of course, many feathered dinosaurs died from the explosive force of asteroids rushing towards them—the equivalent of about 10 billion Hiroshima -sized nuclear bombs —but many of them later died too.
Let us not forget the global cooling that started with all sulfur dioxide. Unlike greenhouse gas , sulfur dioxide has a chilling effect, causing more people to die as the world begins to freeze. The evaporated rocks blocked the sun and ushered in more snow than anyone really wanted to deal with (disclaimer: Science cannot confirm whether certain Cretaceous species really like snow. As far as we know, they may have frolicked and made snow angels) . Many animals are not ready for this sudden cooling (they haven't invented the Canada Goose jacket yet), but do you know who it is? Human. Well, it’s not humans, but ancient mammal ancestors who will one day produce a lineage of humans.
Thank God, they did it because without dinosaurs, our soft bodies and poor helpless babies can thrive freely. Our tiny mammalian predecessors survived the earthquake, volcanic eruptions, acid rain and watched most of the plants they eat die. They live to tell the story. Again, not true, because most likely they don’t have enough complex language to convey the story. Modern Prairie Dog can talk about people's shirt colors, but even they can't say "almost everything died at that time". perhaps.
Our very distant ancestors were next to ancient crocodiles and sharks. Oh my god, they had the upper hand. We have been out of the food chain, except for those who are trying to make friends with those atheistic killing machines: bears. Obviously, nothing could have happened if that meteor appeared in 30 seconds. Early birds eat insects – but they still hate insects.
