Dinosaurs. Fuck em, right?
Stupid big ass walking dumb fucks, plodding about the Earth. They were on this planet for hundreds of millions of years, and they didn’t invent the Xbox. Humans have been around for, like, two decades, and we’ve already built six iterations of the Xbox.
Of course, we are only here, inventing Xboxes, thanks to a random asteroid strike that wiped the dinosaurs from the Earth, paving the way for mammals. No rock, no Xbox.
Right?
Maybe not. A new theory proposes that dumb ass dinosaurs probably would have died on their own, even without help. That the state of the species in the Cretaceous era was less virile young man and more old as fuck grandmother.
The asteroid strike then was not something cataclysmic, that shifted the fate of the entire species, but more akin to you pulling the plug on your Nana, who’s been on life support for years.
From Gizmodo:
Most of us have heard of the giant asteroid impact, and the possibility that volcanoes played a role is also well-known. But a complementary school of thought contends that neither of these two events gives us the full story. Rather, some researchers say the dinosaur lineage was slowly pruning itself for many millions of years prior to the KT-boundary. Until now, this idea has seen limited scientific support.
“Previous studies were quite simple,” Manabu Sakamoto, a paleontologist at the University of Reading and lead author on the new study told Gizmodo. “They counted the number of [dinosaur] species around at each age or time interval to see which ones were peaking or troughing when. To be honest, it’s not a very statistical approach.”
Sakamoto went about it in a different fashion, and found that the dinosaurs were dying out well before anything from space came their way.
Over the Triassic and Jurassic, dinosaur diversity was on the rise, but by the early Cretaceous, speciation had begun to plateau. By the mid to late-Cretaceous, the rate of dinosaur evolution had taken a sharp downturn. It would continue to fall for millions of years before the Chixculub impact.
“New species weren’t being produced as fast as species were going extinct,” Sakamoto explained. “That made the dinosaurs vulnerable to drastic environmental changes—especially something like an apocalypse.”
What a bitch species.
Good riddance, I say. Read about the whole study here.