So much for a spring awakening.
The infamous meteor that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was found to have struck Earth during the northern hemisphere’s springtime — and that understanding could lead to more profound revelations about the unknowns of the planet.
These findings, published today in the journal Nature, shed light on why some species of mammals, crocodiles, turtles, and birds, improbably survived the Cretaceous era’s extinction event, a team of European scientists from Vrije Universiteit, Uppsala University and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility recently reported.
Researchers found that the planet’s seasonal climate might have inadvertently protected some of those prehistoric animals when the Chicxulub meteorite landed in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, causing apocalyptic, global tsunamis and lasting effects that wiped out the dinosaurs, forever changing the planet.
“Annual life cycles, including seasonal timing and duration of reproduction, feeding, hibernation and aestivation, vary strongly across latest Cretaceous biotic clades,” the paleontology team wrote.
“We postulate that the timing of the Chicxulub impact in boreal [northern] spring and austral autumn was a major influence on selective biotic survival.”
Opposite to our spring, colder weather months in the southern hemisphere may have also acted as a protecting agent from the devastation in ways the planet’s warmer top half couldn’t, the scientists found.
“Large-scale wildfires raging across the Southern Hemisphere may have been evaded by hibernating mammals that were already sheltered in burrows in anticipation of austral winter,” the authors wrote.
Researchers also discovered that the fallout from the meteorite — rather than its impact — is what killed off the dinosaurs, and changed life on Earth going forward.
“Although direct effects of the impact devastated a vast geographical area, the global mass extinction probably unfolded during its aftermath, which involved rapid climatic deterioration estimated to have lasted up to several thousands of years.”
These revelations came after the team studied preserved fish bones that had experienced the immediate ramifications of the meteorite’s impact.
The fish had been buried alive by chunks of sediment that drastically shifted when the flaming rock made impact with the planet, within the first hour of collision.
Fish bone fossils were used to determine that the infamous meteorite that killed the dinosaurs landed in our Springtime. Researcher Melanie During excavated these bones in North Dakota in 2017. via REUTERSThe studied samples were found in the southwest region of North Dakota during August of 2017. The area contained “valuable proxies for reconstructing the environmental, climatological and biological conditions” in the area during the Mesozoic era, according to their field report.
After being excavated, the specimens were analyzed by a particle accelerator at the ESRF facility in Grenoble, France, one which can create the brightest X-rays on Earth.
That synchrotron X-ray tomography led to the determination that fishes’ bone composition — which change season to season on a micro level — correlated with springtime in what is now Northern America, according to SciTechDaily.
What exactly wrecked rex? Although many answers are unclear it is now determined the meteorite’s aftermath had more lasting damage than its impact. Getty Images/Science Photo Libra“We saw that both cell density and volumes were on the rise but had not yet peaked during the year of death, which implies that growth abruptly stopped spring,” Dennis Voeten, researcher at Uppsala University, told the outlet.
