Asteroid Timing Erased the Dinosaurs?
A few million years off, and dinosaurs might have survived a big space impact.
There's never a good time for an asteroid impact, of course, but debates have roiled among scholars for decades over whether volcanoes or a long-running decline in species may have played a bigger role in the demise of the dinosaurs. (Related: "Dinosaurs 101.")
Now a Biological Reviews journal report concludes that the asteroid or comet that created the Yucatan's Chicxulub crater was indeed the likely leading culprit. Other factors, most notably a vulnerable sub-population of big plant eaters, essentially left the dinosaurs ripe for the asteroid wipe-out.
"If the asteroid hit five million years later or earlier, the dinosaurs might still be around," says paleontologist Stephen Brusatte of the United Kingdom's University of Edinburgh, a member of
