Asteroids Helped Dinosaurs Live, Scientists Say

The dinosaurs' extinction may have not been caused by the Manicouagan event, the scorching of asteroid through the Earth's atmosphere and slamming into the northern region of the supercontinent Pangaea around 215 million years ago, as initially believed by scientists.

The dinosaur's Jurassic-Triassic extinction, that led to the global dominance of dinosaurs, was believed to be the result of the so called Manicouagan event. However, it turned out recently that the event took place about 12 million years too early, leaving scientists to doubt their initial theory, NewsBout reported.

The dinosaurs' extinction is now theorized as a result of the Manicouagan impact, not the scorching of the asteroids solely, as the recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports suggested. The Manicouagan impact is believed to have created a mass extinction of its own and may have contributed to the Jurassic-Triassic extinction and the resulting dino-domination, AOL News reported.

The available data propose that the three types of sea critters, the microscopic radiolarians, the eel-like conodonts and the mollusks called ammonoids, underwent three big extinction phases, leading up to the Jurassic-Triassic. The later collapse of the species has been related to ocean anoxia and volcanic eruptions. However, the die-offs of the microscopic radiolarians, which appears to be massive and global in scale, remained a puzzle and a mystery.

In an attempt to solve the mystery, a team of Japanese researchers searched into fossils, which are embedded in a claystone seafloor area of the Panthalassa, the former super ocean that once surrounded Pangaea.

The researchers found out that around the time of the Manicouagan impact, many species of tiny radiolarians died. The resulting collapse of the ocean ecosystem may have caused the mass extinction of the conodonts and ammonoids, the researchers hypothesized.

The dinosaur's Jurassic-Triassic extinction killed about 34 percent of marine species, while many reptiles, amphibians, and other creatures vanished on land. The dinosaurs, then took advantage of this ecological vacancy, rising to prominence during the Jurassic. Therefore, the asteroids may have actually helped them survive for a longer period of time, than the other creatures which were with them during their existence.