Science is constantly evolving, new technologies allow us to see deeper into the past and find out things that we thought preciously were wrong, incomplete, or just not at all what we thought. One of the few things that seemed set in stone was the downfall of dinosaurs 66 million years ago due to a mass extinction event, which was believed to be triggered by an asteroid, but what if that is not the whole story?
A new research team made up of scholars from China, the United States, and the United Kingdom has decided to take on some of the most common unanswered questions regarding the extinction of dinosaurs, like the conditions they lived in, if they would have continued to thrive should the asteroid not have happened or if different conditions would have allowed them to survive despite the crash.
The answers to these questions could also help us nowadays, because even though there have been plenty of asteroids crashing into Earth, none of them have been of that magnitude, but one day they could be.
The new dinosaur researchers and their thesis
The team has chosen to use a modern ecological approach to reassess dinosaur population estimates from the Late Cretaceous period. Their aim is to address potential inaccuracies caused by fossil record bias and for that they applied methods commonly used in ecology, which incorporate more than just fossil data.
Their analysis is quite limited, only focusing on the Campanian and Maastrichtian stages, which spans from approximately 83 to 66 million years ago and has been extensively studied before due to its proximity to the mass extinction event, which means there is a lot of research and data available to draw from.
But since the aim is to expand on what is there and not just rely on outdated views or theories, they will not be relying solely on the incomplete fossil record. The scientists employed a Bayesian occupancy modeling framework, which integrated paleoclimate indicators, geographic distribution, and existing fossil data to provide a more nuanced understanding of species abundance during that time.
By doing this they managed to challenge the previous population estimates that scientists had created, as they relied heavily on fossil counts. Since fossil record may not always be a reliable way for gauging species prevalence, disregarding them as primary sources for counting is a good place to start to rebuild population models in this period.
Their reasoning is simple, just like nowadays, some areas have a higher concentration of fossils because of the environmental conditions that allowed them to be preserved for millions of years before they were discovered, but there are areas where conditions were not as optimal and we do not have as many samples to draw from, which does not mean that there were not any huge populations there.
As the scientists explained in the paper compiling their findings The “restriction of the available sampling window” for areas of North America, “suggests that dinosaur preservation and subsequent detection were comparatively reduced in the Maastrichtian record compared with the Campanian, which has potentially skewed interpretations of dinosaur diversity dynamics.”
Since this means that even though fewer fossils have been found from the Maastrichtian era population would not have been very different to the Campanian era, everything we assumed about the conditions of the Earth and its hospitability to dinosaurs could be wrong, and the asteroid might have either been the catalyst or just one event in a long line to their extinction.
Obviously there is a lot more research that needs to be done on this period to fully understand what happened, but even if this research never goes any further, it will have clarified a lot of unknowns that scientists have been wrestling with for year.