Experts believe that a gigantic asteroid that hit the earth around 65 million years ago is responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs from the planet. It should be noted that dinosaurs were the most dominant species on the earth during those times, but the mass extinction event literally rewrote history, and in the course of time, these killer giants were wiped out from the blue planet.
Absence of sex lakes?
Even though an asteroid hit the planet around 65 million years ago, a top researcher claims that this deadly hit is not the real reason behind the extinction of dinosaurs. Professor Brian J Ford, a popular biologist who authored the book 'Too Big to Walk: The New Science of Dinosaurs', believes that it was continental drift that decided the fate of dinosaurs on earth.
As per Brian J Ford, dinosaurs had used sex lakes for mating due to their gigantic body size, as the buoyancy of these lakes helped these creatures to support their massive bulk. Due to continental drift, these sex lakes became absent, and it negatively impacted their breeding process.
"As the continents drifted, the shallow lakes shrank, and the dinosaurs' ecosystem disappeared. The giant dinosaurs could only evolve wading in shallow water to take their weight. Once the Earth's surface changed, their environment disappeared ... and so did they. But if the vast shallow lakes had persisted? Dinosaurs would be with us today. And poachers would be hunting them just as they do any other spectacular wildlife," Ford told the Sun.
Ford also added that many species survived the mass extinction event, but dinosaurs failed, and this is due to their increased dependency on sex lakes to produce offsprings.
Volcanoes to be blamed?
Scientists initially proposed the asteroid impact theory to explain the extinction of dinosaurs after the discovery that a layer of rock dated precisely to the extinction event is rich in the metal iridium. It should be noted that iridium is such an element which is very rare on the earth but can be found in plenty in meteors and asteroids, and this factor made many believe that an extraterrestrial impact could have resulted in the mass death of dinosaurs.
However, some scientists believe that a volcanic eruption could have caused the extinction of dinosaurs, as earth's core is also rich in iridium. These scientists believe that volcanic activities may be higher 65 million years ago, and such an event could have wiped out dinosaurs from the earth's surface.
