New research has revealed more about what brought an end to the reign of the dinosaurs than we have ever known before.
Trying to wrap our heads around the fact that millions of years ago not only did humans not exist, but dinosaurs walked in our place can be pretty tough. It can sometimes feel as if their existence is almost fictional. Fabricated in order to sell stories and make movies. They were very real though and were wiped off the face of the Earth around 66 million years ago.
Although we know what brought an end to the reign of the dinosaurs here on Earth, we actually know very little about the event. An asteroid hitting the planet wiped out around 75% of all living things on Earth. Pretty staggering. Thanks to new research conducted by the University of Texas, we now know a lot more about what came next.
For starters, the power of the asteroid striking the Earth was the equivalent of 10 billion atomic bombs. Yes, that is billion with a B, so it’s really a miracle that anything survived at all. While a large number of the massive reptiles would have been wiped out pretty soon after the asteroid strike, many will have also perished during the days and weeks that followed.
How are we still finding new information out now, we hear you ask? Well, the aforementioned research was conducted on the rocks that filled the asteroid’s impact crater in the hours after it hit. 425 feet of rock was deposited to be exact within the space of that very first day. The rocks were deposited by the asteroid itself and also swept in by seawater as the asteroid struck in the Gulf of Mexico.
As for other things that contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs, how about that seawater? A tsunami so big that it reached Illinois will have taken out a fair few. It also blasted so much sulphur into the air that it blocked out the sun, hence the drastically cooling effect on the planet which continued to kill creatures in the weeks that followed. Now, how about we focus some of that research on bringing dinosaurs back. And no, we don’t think Jurassic Park is evidence of why we shouldn’t do that.
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