Was an Asteroid the True Reason Behind the Extinction of Dinosaurs?

66 Million years ago in the mesozoic era Dinosaurs ruled the world. Until one fateful day in Spring when a huge rock came down, causing the demise of most life forms. That rock was actually an asteroid, or as scientists have named it, Chicxulub. The question remains, why did this asteroid hit the Earth and how did it happen?

Scientists suggest that an asteroid was the only possible way that the dinosaurs could have been completely wiped out. The bulk of the evidence behind this theory is within the layers of the outer crust of the Earth. Scientists kept an account of the process of them drilling into the area where they believe the asteroid struck earth. Their research talks about how “large impact craters have ‘peak rings’ that define a complex crater morphology,” (paragraph 1). Peak rings are basically craters that are more shallow and less defined than the asteroid one was initially. Using this evidence they were able to come to the conclusion that the only thing strong enough to make a deep and large impact in the ground was an asteroid. More evidence proving this, was published in The Royal Society and it suggests that there is no possible way that the extinction of dinosaurs could be blamed on anything, but the asteroid. Scientists studied 12 dinosaur phylogenies, or family trees  to see if they could still be viable today. Studying a total of 2727 different types of species, they came to the conclusion that 518 (19%) of those species would be more likely to demise prior to the absolute extinction from the asteroid. This evidence could debunk other theories about the dinosaurs slowly dying out previously to the asteroid. 

This picture shows the peak ring in the sedimentary rock layers and the layer in the Mesozoic time and the Cenozoic (right after dinosaurs - now)

More recently, scientists found evidence that suggests the dinosaur extinction was actually during the spring. They found that a type of fish called acipenseriformes were actually in the process of growing, by studying their spines. As we know, springtime is when there is a lot of mating, causing an abundance of food to be readily available to predators. Thus causing the predators to grow which is why these scientists found that “six fish perished (that is, stopped growing) while forming a grow zone…” (paragraph 8). Furthermore, the type of fish that the scientists were studying are filter feeding fish. Filter feeding fish have a diet that primarily consist of small organisms and they have special teeth that allow them to be able to filter the food from the water. The type of organism they were eating is actually known to “enrich the growing skeleton of filter-feeding fish,” (paragraph 9). 

Here is the basic outline of the fossil of an acipenseriformes fish

The Earth has so much history and when we dig up the different layers we get an outlook on all of it. We learn so many things about life on Earth before humans and some animals existed, just by digging a little bit.