Dinosaurs were Declining before they went Extinct, a Research Reveals

        Whether dinosaurs were at their pinnacle or were in decline before they died out has been hotly contested.

 

(T-Rex) Tyrannosaurus (source: Wikipedia)

Beijing: A study of fossilised eggs in China reveals that dinosaurs were not extremely diversified and had generally fallen even before their extinction roughly 66 million years ago.

 

According to the researchers, huge volcanic eruptions from the Deccan Traps in India and long-term declines in the variety of dinosaur lineages worldwide may have caused the reduction in the previous few million years.

 

They suggested that these elements may have caused ecosystem-wide instability, making non-bird dinosaurs vulnerable to a mass extinction that occurred at the same time as the asteroid impact.

 

It is thought that a sizable asteroid that struck Earth after the Cretaceous period, between 145 and 66 million years ago, played a role in the widespread extinction of dinosaurs, leaving birds as their sole surviving offspring.

 

Whether dinosaurs were at their pinnacle or were in decline before they died out has been hotly contested. North America provides the majority of the scientific information about the demise of the dinosaurs.

 

Even though some published studies contend that the dinosaur populations there were prospering before their mass extinction, other, more thorough studies contend that the dinosaurs were really in decline, which prepared the way for their eventual mass extinction.

 

More than 1,000 fossilised dinosaur eggs and eggshells from the Shanyang Basin in central China were analysed by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

These fossils were found in rock layers that were roughly 150 metres thick overall. The study, which was just published in the journal PNAS, used computer modelling to analyse and analyse over 5,500 geological samples to determine the precise ages of the rock layers.

 

As a result, they were able to construct a timeline at the end of the Cretaceous that covered almost 2 million years and had a resolution of 100,000 years, marking the moment just before extinction.

 

Direct comparisons with data from around the world are possible using this timeline. The researchers observed a reduction in dinosaur variety based on the Shanyang Basin data.

 

Macroolithus (source: Wikipedia)

For instance, they claimed that the 1,000 fossilised dinosaur eggs found in the basin only come from three distinct species: Macroolithus yaotunensis, Elongatoolithus elongatus, and Stromatoolithus pinglingensis.

Oviraptors(source: Wikimedia)

The scientists also discovered that two of the three dinosaur eggs were from the oviraptors, a species of toothless dinosaurs, while the third egg came from the hadrosaurids, a group of plant-eating dinosaurs also known as duck-billed dinosaurs.

 

Hadrosaurid(source: Wikimedia)

Tyrannosaurus and Sauropod were also present there between around 66.4 and 68.2 million years ago, according to a few more dinosaur bones found in the vicinity, the researchers added.

 

Sauropod(source: Wikipedia)

According to the researchers, central China's low variety of dinosaur species persisted for the previous 2 million years before the mass extinction.

 

These findings, along with information from North America, implying that dinosaur populations were likely dropping globally before extinction, continued.