Yahoo News Dinosaurs ‘were not affected by climate change’ and were thriving when asteroid hit
The dinosaurs were actually thriving right up until the moment when a huge asteroid hurtled in from space, heralding the end of their time as rulers of this planet.
At the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, a huge asteroid (possibly coupled with volcanic eruptions) wiped out the dinosaurs.
But some scientists believe that the huge creatures had been declining anyaway, due to climate change.
New mathematical analysis from researchers at the Imperial College London, University College London and University of Bristol has suggested that the creatures were actually thriving.
The researchers used ‘ecological niche modelling’ to work out where there had been areas which would have allowed dinosaurs to survive.
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Lead researcher Alessandro Chiarenza, a PhD student in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: ‘Dinosaurs were likely not doomed to extinction until the end of the Cretaceous, when the asteroid hit, declaring the end of their reign and leaving the planet to animals like mammals, lizards and a minor group of surviving dinosaurs: birds.
‘The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous.
‘Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.’
