The Asteroid Killed The Dinosaurs Destroyed Too Early Birds

Wednesday, September 21, 2011




Paleontologists have debated for years about the fate of the first "primitive" birds that were very different from today's species and their populations slowly declined over time or were killed by the impact of Giant in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, researchers at Yale University have confirmed that a catastrophic attack meteor at the same time that the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have wiped out even the old birds.

The team of paleontologists led by Yale scholar, Nicholas Long said Rich fossil evidence that many primitive species have survived to the time of the impact of a meteorite.

The team's findings, published in the Proceedings of this week the National Academy of Sciences, shows that all the samples examined lived within 300 thousand years of mass extinction event 65 million years.

"This shows that these species have become extinct rapidly in terms of geological time scales," he said in a statement Longrich University.

Although researchers had suspected that many ancient lineages of birds have become extinct with a number of other creatures in the late Cretaceous, "the fossil evidence was somewhat vague," noted Rich Long, MSNBC reported.

This uncertainty has left open the possibility that these birds really began to die out very slowly before the mass extinction.

To help clarify this mystery, the researchers examined a large collection of about two dozen bird fossils found in North America represent a wide range of species that existed during the Cretaceous period.

The researchers said the fossil birds from the Cretaceous are very rare bird bones are so light and fragile that they can be easily damaged or swept away by torrents.

The analysis of 24 samples, the researchers identified 17 species, seven of which were "archaic birds", who disappeared after the KT mass extinction, the BBC reported.

These results demonstrate for the first time a multitude of live birds archaic until the end of the Cretaceous period, this means that the birds have become extinct suddenly 65 million years.

Rich Long said he believes burglary archaic species of birds survived the Cretaceous and the impact of modern birds evolved.

"The design of a bird base was in place, but all the specialized functions have evolved after the mass extinction, when the birds are a kind of re-evolved with the diversity they show today. It is similar to what happened to the mammal after the age of dinosaurs, "said Rich Long.



For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

0 comments:

Post a Comment