“It’s kind of an open question why some groups survived and some didn’t.”īoyd offered crocodiles as an example. “With some of it, we don’t know,” Boyd said. Crocodiles, small mammals, and even some tenacious plants, for example, managed to live on after the asteroid impact. What Survived and How?īelieve it or not, some animals and other organisms survived the mass extinction. But in recent years, the asteroid theory has been the one that has stuck due to more and more evidence, such as tsunami deposits near the Yucatán Peninsula and the presence of iridium – a metal that’s found in asteroids – that are around the same age as the extinction. Boyd said some other hypotheses included a virus, climate change, or even an influx in mammals that ate dinosaur eggs, so they eventually died out. Though many scientists agree that an asteroid was, at the very least, a catalyst for the K-Pg extinction, paleontologists came up with just about every hypothesis a person could think of, because, hey, everyone is just trying to figure this thing out. To make a long story short, it would not have been a fun time to be alive. The planet would have been jolted into climate change. “In other areas that were farther away from the impact, it would have been a similar type of, except for there, they would have had to deal more with so much debris and soot being put into the air that it blacks out the skies,” Boyd said. Once the plant eaters died out, the meat eaters would have run out of food. The fires would have wiped out the main course for plant eaters, so they would have starved. If the animals didn’t immediately die from the heat flash, falling debris, or fires, they still had a rapidly crumbling food chain to contend with. Overall, the K-Pg extinction event was likely pretty quick, especially in North America, Boyd said. In addition to the heat generated by the impact, things such as hot bits of glass and rock would have rained down on the dinosaurs in a matter of only a few minutes. “It would not have been a great time to be around.” “The directionality of the impact blew all of the debris in this direction,” Boyd said. The dinosaurs and other creatures living in North America would have been particularly hard-hit, said Boyd. There would have been a bright flash and a release of energy that some experts say would have been the equivalent of millions of nuclear bombs going off simultaneously. Clint Boyd, senior paleontologist at the North Dakota Geological Survey, said it would have been a very quick event since the asteroid travelled at approximately 17,000 miles per hour. Emily Graslie meets with experts in the Hell Creek Formation to learn more about the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.įirst, let’s go back to that very bad day for the dinosaurs.

Dino survival