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After emerging during the Triassic Period around 230 million years ago, dinosaurs occupied all continents and dominated most terrestrial ecosystems, until they were extinguished by the impact of asteroids. 66 million years ago.
But researchers at the British University of Bath hope to put this theory to bed. By bringing together diverse and up-to-date data, the researchers used statistical analysis to assess whether dinosaurs were still able to produce new species until they were prematurely extinct.
“If the asteroid impact had never happened, they might not have died out and continued after the Cretaceous period,” added Bonsor, doctoral student at the Natural History Museum in London and the Milner Center for Evolution. from the University of Bath.
During their more than 150 million years on earth, dinosaurs evolved to take many shapes and forms – some dinosaurs were tiny, while others were over 100 feet tall. Experts believe diversity was the key to their dominance on Earth, with armor, crests, teeth, and even feathers.
Previous research had suggested that this diversity was starting to decline and dinosaurs were starting to lose their dominance.
Researchers at the University of Bath claim that after examining more groups of dinosaurs, their more up-to-date and detailed family trees show that dinosaurs from all continents were in fact flourishing, with herbivorous animals such as than hadrosaurs, ceratopsians. and the dominant ankylosaurs in North America, and carnivorous abelisaurs continue to thrive in South America.
“The main point of what we’re saying is that we don’t really have enough data to know what would have happened to the dinosaurs anyway,” Bonsor said. “In general, in the fossil record there is a bias towards a lack of data, and interpreting these gaps in the fossil record as an artificial drop in diversification rates is not what we should be doing.
“Instead, we have shown that there is no solid evidence of their disappearance, and that the only way to know for sure is to fill in the gaps in the fossil record,” he added. .
Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research, told CNN in an email that the study “probably applies the largest evolutionary tree dataset of dinosaurs to this day and applies extensive methods to examine rates of diversification towards the end of the Mesozoic. “
He noted that the research added weight to the argument that non-avian dinosaurs were thriving, not declining, before the asteroid struck.
“To paraphrase TS Eliot,” Chiarenza said, “This is how the dinosaurs ended, not with a whine but with a bang.”
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