Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs

I just read an article about the distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs. I sat back and thought about it for a moment. I seem to like this notion that this kind of collision played the role. I'm keeping my mind open on other hypotheses and theories. It's worth reading.

On other note, I do believe that the asteroid has caused the catastrophe about 65 million years ago. The crash was powerful enough to put Earth in dark for a period of time. My biggest question is how did mammals survive? Did a fraction of plants survive without the sunlight ray? I have thought about the continuous activities of volcanoes that may have allowed the small group of plants at unaffected area to survive.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From what I can remember of other discussions on this topic, I think the argument was not that the collision itself necessarily wiped out the dinosaurs - although obviously anything directly in the asteroid's trajectory would have regretted it - but the knock-on consequences. Mammals, which at that time were predominantly small, shrew-like creatures, would have been better equipped to deal with the climate following such an impact. They were smaller, and so required less food, nocturnal and warm-blooded (at this point I'm leaving out the arguments for and against homeothermy in dinosaurs).