Question
What really killed the dinosaurs?
Answer
Chris Smith put this to palaeontologist Jason Head...
Jason - There are two answers to that question. The first, of course, is that dinosaurs are doing fine today; there’s about 18,000 species of living birds. But the second half of that question is what happened to dinosaurs that aren’t birds? And the last of the non-bird dinosaurs go extinct around the end of cretaceous, that’s 66½ million years ago. That coincides with very strong geological evidence for an extraterrestrial impact of an asteroid or another form of bolide. It appears to be a fundamental global environmental change that corresponds with a mass extinction event in both terrestrial and marine environments. So for the non-birds, it appears that the very last of them went extinct possibly as a result of this impact.
Chris - Were there not some enormous volcanoes going off at around the same time that were also had the potential to make similar changes to the Earth’s climate and the Earth’s atmosphere?
Jason - Yeah. So the last million or two years of the cretaceous of the mesozoic, there’s what is called flood salts in India, the Deccan Traps which are a kilometre and a half thick sequence of volcanic rock formed from these massive volcanoes, and they absolutely are changing Earth’s atmospheric chemistry during this period of time. They are a big and important component of a changing environment.
Chris - Kate?
Kate - If the crater theory is what happened, and this big catastrophic event is what knocked out all of the giant dinosaurs, do you think that it was required for that sort of geological historical event to happen in order for mammals to become so successful, and ergo humans to have become what we are today?
Jason - We think a lot about that. Whether or not the rise of mammals in the cenozoic is the result of ecological release or the loss of competitive exclusion, and there’s some pretty good evidence that that might be the case. Certainly patterns of body size evolution in mammals show that they get bigger when the dinosaurs are gone. We diversity as a clade within a couple of million years of dinosaurs having gone extinct so I think it’s tricky to pin that down 100 percent, but the evidence looks pretty good for it.
Comments
Dinosaur's Demise.
Re: demise of the dinosaurs; their reign of terror must have given purpose to the smaller and more vulnerable species; if they were to survive they would have had to learn quickly, increasing their intelligence. Once a higher level of intelligence had been accomplished then it was inevitable that the dinosaur's threat was scaled down and it has kept scaling down to the present day.
Another example of this is the primates; did they stop evolving to a higher intelligence, because that intelligence had been achieved? I am not suggesting any Divine intervention, but a natural process. I am sure we will find the answer once we begin to understand the complexity of it all.
Though Darwin got most of it right there is a lot yet to be turned over. Let me add another question based on the fact that life cannot see accurately; is Einstein's equation-energy equals matter at the speed of light squared still relevant when considering Feynman's one electron theory? Is this the reason for not solving the existence of dark energy and dark matter, had Einstein got it wrong? Like in the quantum world, reality is not sometimes what we see.
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