The classic scientific explanation for why the dinosaurs aren’t here nowadays is that a huge asteroid of about 5 km in its radius smashed into Earth about 66 million years ago. Unfortunately for our giant friends or not, they didn’t evolve enough to invent any defense systems, nor did they have a Bruce Willis among them to try to save the day by nuking the asteroid.
After the collision, huge amounts of ashes blocked the sunlight for hundreds of years. All the remaining life forms slowly died over time, lacking sunlight and, therefore, oxygen and heat.
But is that really how the dinosaurs went extinct? Certainly, nobody was there 66 million years ago to know for sure, which means that we’re free to speculate. Perhaps that’s also what researchers responsible for a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) had in mind when they came up with their new theory, although they have some strong arguments.
Blame it on volcanoes, instead
The new research brings the theory that huge volcanic activity spanning across continents is to blame for the extinction of Dino & co 66 million years ago. However, the researchers’ work implies the possibility that volcanoes also caused other extinctions in the history of our planet.
The researchers believe that despite decades of explorations, there is not enough evidence that events such as the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid coincided with the other mass extinctions recorded in history.
It was also concluded, coincidence or not, that four out of five mass extinctions occurred in a similar period as flood basalt kicked in, meaning a type of volcanic outpouring.
Brenhin Keller, a co-author of the study, said, as Yahoo News quotes:
All other theories that attempted to explain what killed the dinosaurs, including volcanism, got steamrolled when the Chicxulub impact crater was discovered.
While it is difficult to determine if a particular volcanic outburst caused one particular mass extinction, our results make it hard to ignore the role of volcanism in extinction.
There were 700 different species of dinosaurs existing on Earth, which means that with or without an asteroid, nature had a lot of work to do to get rid of all those reptiles.