Around 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs' rule on planet came to a fiery end when a 10-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth off Mexico's coast. The change triggered a drastic temperature shift that saw loads of garbage plowed through the atmosphere for hundreds of years, shutting out the Light.
The dinosaurs died out as a result, giving way to tiny creatures that would finally conquer the planet.
It was largely assumed that when the comet was just the icing on the cake when it comes to the dinosaurs' disappearance, as scholars had claimed they were still dying out. But a recent study finds otherwise.
A study by the University of Bath and the Museum of Natural History has shown that if it was not for the comet, the dinosaurs would have managed to "thrive" on Earth. Researchers had published their results in the journal The Royal Society Open Science on Tuesday.
Dinosaurs Could Have Thrived Today
The researchers studied the evidence from several separate family trees of dinosaurs and used mathematical modeling to see if they survived until the asteroid attack.
They learned the dinosaurs were thriving, and they displayed no indication of letting go of their global supremacy.
"What we found is that the dinosaurs were still dominant, they were still widespread and still doing really well," Joe Bonsor, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum, said.
"If the asteroid impact had never happened then they might not have died out and they would have continued," Bonsor added.
Certain dinosaurs were doing better than others, such as hadrosaurs and the "thriving" horned ceratopsians.
These dinosaurs, including the tyrannosaurs, were the victims of great predators.
More Supporting Studies Needed
The study suggests that the earlier studies reached this inference by modeling dinosaur family trees based on previous fossil records, DailyMail reported.
Based on the fossil record, experts believed that dinosaurs were dying out. Though, not all that dies becomes fossilized. Hence, the team had to look at the larger dinosaur family trees and extrapolate results.
"Previous studies done by others have used various methods to [conclude] that dinosaurs would have died out anyway, as they were in decline towards the end of the Cretaceous period," Bonsor said.
Lack of evidence can also imply a reduction in biodiversity, although this does not represent the truth at the moment.
The whole aspect of what we're thinking is that we don't have enough evidence to determine what was going to happen to the dinosaurs either way. Instead, we have seen that no clear proof remains that they are dying out.
Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, told CNN in an email that the research possibly introduces the largest dataset of evolutionary dinosaur trees ever and uses systematic techniques to look at diversification rates towards the end of the Mesozoic.
He noted that the study added weight to the claim that before the asteroid struck, non-avian dinosaurs were abundant, not diminishing.
"This is the way dinosaurs ended, not with a whimper but with a bang," Chiarenza said.
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