We all know that dinosaurs went extinct
around 66 million years ago because of a
huge asteroid impact. But what's been
debated for decades was whether
dinosaurs were flourishing up until that
point or whether dinosaurs were in a
long-term decline. We ran some
statistical analyses on some fossil data
and what we found was quite astonishing
actually because we found that they were
in a very long-term decline for up to
50 million years before their final extinction.
It is interesting to think about
what this decline in dinosaurs means for
other groups that were around at the time. There
were opportunities for other groups of
animals to take advantage of that in an
ecological and evolutionary sense and
the group of animals that did probably
take advantage of that was the mammals.
What this implies is that dinosaurs were
going extinct much faster than they were
able to replace with new species and
this made them vulnerable to
catastrophic environmental changes of
apocalyptic scale such as the asteroid
impact at the end of the Cretaceous
period 66 million years ago.
Our study provides the best evidence yet that
there was the possibility for other
groups of animals like the mammals to be
on the rise even before the dinosaurs
went extinct.
