Dinosaurs Showing Signs of Decay Before Asteroid Impact, According to Fossil Record

The dinosaurs may not have faded before the asteroid wiped them all. Instead, there may be limited fossils from that period, New research.

It has been heatedly debated whether dinosaur populations are thriving or decreasing when a giant asteroid was hit by a planet about 66 million years ago. Specifically, the decline in the availability of dinosaur fossils in the year leading up to the asteroid has led some scientists to believe that the giant is doomed, regardless of the impact.

Christopher Dean University College London and his team analyzed a data set of over 8,000 fossils from four dinosaurs that lived in famous North America between 84 and 66 million years ago. Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops. They discovered many fossils of dinosaurs between 84 and 75 million years ago. And that number fell in the 9 million years leading up to the impact of Chicxulub. But there was more.

Now, when calculating the land that paleontologists are currently accessible from the year leading up to the impact of the asteroid, and how many excavations have been made in those areas, Dean’s team discovered that there are not many suitable rocks available for today’s scientists to study.

Paleontologists are looking for fossils in ancient layers of Earth’s crust that have been exposed to the surface ever since, so it’s like working on a “puzzle that’s missing half of the pieces,” Dean says.

Using ecological models, the team estimated the plausible number of dinosaurs in these regions, including information about geology and geography at the time, their calculations suggested that the overall number of dinosaurs remained stable prior to the asteroid collision. There were fewer dinosaurs back then. We are unlikely to find them, Dean said:

This adds to many studies suggesting that there is a bias in the number of fossils that paleontologists can access from North America within nine million years leading up to the asteroid hit. Sakamoto Manab from a UK Reading University that was not involved in the research. However, he says this will not change the larger picture of a dinosaur that is fading before the asteroid is attacked.

Even if dinosaurs still had a large population and dominant towards the end of the Cretaceous period, there appears to be no significant variation in their species. Sakamoto’s Research It suggests that dinosaurs have roamed the world over the course of 175 million years, but that the overall speed at which new species of dinosaurs appeared will slow down overall, suggesting that more dinosaur species will disappear than the new ones evolve.

This long-term decline in dinosaur diversity remains true, Sakamoto says, despite new research suggesting the biases of available fossils, “these two things are not mutually exclusive.”