![]() New Scientist Ltd retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. To answer this question – or ask a new one – email should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. ![]() It is interesting to reflect on what prevented the resurgence of dinosaurs from this base. ![]() Jeffrey Stilwell at Monash University in Australia and colleagues have found three herbivorous and two carnivorous species. In New Zealand, a region that was far from Chicxulub at the time of the impact, a full ecological suite of dinosaurs survived for another million years. Dinosaurs are alive and well in a chicken coop near you. The asteroid impact had a cooling effect many magnitudes greater.Īs the author Mark Twain once said, reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. For scale, the Pinatubo eruption in 2001, which injected large amounts of ash and gas high into the atmosphere that spread worldwide, caused an average global cooling of 0.6 ☌. Remaining species of dinosaurs appear to have been doing fine until the Chicxulub asteroid struck. A likely cause is the loss of habitats due to the retreat of inland seas and climate change caused by volcanism in the Deccan Traps on the Indian subcontinent. In the 10 million years before the impact, the number of species almost halved. The more than 10,000 species of living birds are descendants of the survivors of the asteroid impact.īut dinosaurs were already in decline. David Archibald, Professor emeritus of biology, San Diego State University, California It is possible that most of the extinctions may have happened within months of the impact. Once the dust settled, Earth would have experienced global warming because of the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the wildfires. For many, surviving simply prolonged their demise because the dust that was lofted into the stratosphere blocked out sunlight, cooling the globe and reducing photosynthesis, leading to the collapse of food chains.
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