This is a 2-part NOVA series, cribbed from the BBC special, describing the finds in North Dakota, that may well be the smoking gun to the day the dinosaurs died.
75 million years is a long time, for Darwin to have his way. I don't believe Dinosaurs died out because just one event.
The amount of fossil record we have is due to geological formations left a snapshot at that time. It's pretty inconsistent around the world. Some features expose one period while another region and features expose another. We're looking in those tiny windows to cast judgement on what was going on around that time, around the rest of the world. In a million or so years from now, an even bigger window into fossil record will be uncovered. Basically we're trying to curate the whole historic record of billions and millions of years from looking at what we can sweep out of the sand with a tooth brush. Is like trying to judge a bushel of apples from a few apples from the top. The rest of the whole batch could be rotten.
Every 20 years they have to rewrite the textbooks, I was never sold on the whole meteor mass extinction story. Life is just too resilient.
I think evolution and species just running into a genetic dead end. Like specialized eaters, over reproducing and eating up their food source. Either they will evolve to exploit another food stuff, or they will die out.
75 million years is a long time for a species to see whole mountain ranges shoot up around them, cutting off their wetland from a water source, and eventually drying out. That would leave a whole ecosystem that has to find a new line of work.
Thanks for sharing. Honest science keeps inching closer to the truth. The dinosaur extinction was both sudden (as in most of the bones we find are from a single event) and gradual (as in the few survivors either evolved into creatures still around today or died off completely if they could not adapt or humans hunted them to oblivion. Those bones in the badlands were left behind preserved after a great cataclysm. But at least two members of each kind of animal survived on the Ark. The survivors then evolved and adapted or became extinct.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/dinosaur-apocalypse/?source=patrick.net
Pretty cool for those of you who are STEM, or who have kids who like this stuff.