ExtinctZoo - How Long Did The Dinosaurs Actually Survive After The Asteroid?

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

People often ask about how bad the asteroid that struck the dinosaurs was, or what would happen if it hit earth today, but no one's really asked just how long the dinosaurs survived after d-day...

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Powered by Verizon for $25 a month, taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan. Using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply, limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. Approximately 66 million years ago, dinosaurs experienced just about the worst day possible

on Earth, when a giant asteroid, the size of Mount Everest, slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula at speeds 28 times greater than that of an AK-47 bullet. Within an instant, the energy equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima's was unleashed upon the world, bringing about what many consider to have been the most violent and abrupt extinction event of all time. This was the KT extinction event. Today, paleontologists believe that about 75% or more of all species on Earth at the time vanished, with nearly no creature above 25 kilos or 55 pounds surviving.

Among the many fallen, the most iconic were by far the non-avian dinosaurs, who up until that point had ruled the lands for roughly 165 million years. The out-of-knowness of the dinosaur's extinction, coupled with how fast it happened, has led to many referring to the day of impact as the day the dinosaurs died, and there are even documentaries with such names. But did the dinosaurs really die all at once on the same day? After all, they could be found on every continent during the late Cretaceous and were fairly diverse, with researchers estimating that there were over 1,000 species roaming around when the asteroid touched down.

Many of these dinosaurs were armored, others giant, and some were even below the weight threshold, so it seems a bit hard to believe that they just vanished in an instant. And for the most part, paleontologists do think that the demise of non-avian dinosaurs was not instantaneous, meaning that technically we had dinosaurs during the Cenozoic. However, studies still support the idea that the majority of dinosaurs did in fact perish within the first 24 hours due to the multiple widespread effects of the asteroid. Extreme heat, forest fires, blast waves, earthquakes, and tsunamis were all very real threats after all, especially for those in the Western Hemisphere, with many as far away as 1,500

miles or 2,400 kilometers, dying within virtual minutes. Across the globe, some were shielded from these immediate effects, but what even they cannot escape was the massive amounts of super hot material that had been thrown up into the atmosphere and space, with possibly as much as 25 trillion tons having been ejected. This material was for a while several times hotter than even the surface of the sun. So when a good chunk of it came raining back down, it heated up the atmosphere to oven-like temperatures, cooking anything out in the open from the inside out, and starting fires in roughly 70% of all forests on earth. This alone left only a few animals standing, but in certain areas that were

more protected, like marshes, dense humid forests, in high latitudes, pockets of dinosaurs would have remained standing. It's however worth mentioning that these survivors were likely not the big boys, but rather small species and maybe juveniles. Things, however, were not over for them yet, because all the fires and ejecta both led to untold amounts of dust, soot, and other particles coating the skies and blocking out the sun, leading to sharp decreases in global temperature, where the average may have dropped as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit or 20 degrees Celsius. On top of this, the blocking of the sun led to perpetual darkness, which brought its own unpleasant issues. It's thought that this apocalyptic winter was the final nail in the coffin for the non-avian dinosaurs.

But it's also where things get a bit gray, because no one really knows how long it took for this period to kill the survivors, or if some even survived this fallout, yet were impacted enough to where they couldn't ever recover. A good chunk of researchers believe that at the very least, survivors hung on for a few weeks, months, or possibly years, with carnivores likely sticking around the longest, as at the start there would have been a plethora of carcasses to choose from, while herbivores, on the other hand, were pretty much doomed from the get-go, with most of their food having been burnt in the forest fires. Some of the luckier ones may have stumbled upon preserved pockets of vegetation,

But that did not last long either. And then once the herbivores dropped, the carnivores soon followed, with one of the most recent studies, putting an exact expiration date on dinosaurs of 15 years after D-Day. The study suggested that all the dust and other material in the air would have sustained a 15-year nightmare, where temperatures were low and photosynthesis was almost entirely blocked, with it being completely halted for at least one year.

Within this time frame, it's thought that the non-avian dinosaurs, who were already few and far between, slowly dropped like flies, either freezing or starving to death. And there are multiple other studies that paints similar time spans, typically all falling within 100 years. However, others have pushed back on these shorter times, preferring the idea that the end was not quick,

but rather strung out over millenniums, with small populations surviving well into the early Danian stage, and signifying that entire generations of dinosaurs continued to persist and arise. Many of these longer estimates fall within a few thousand years, Yet some even approach the tens of thousands of years, as demonstrated by one 2013 study, which indicated that it took the collision event about 33,000 years to kill off every single non-avian dinosaur. The idea here was that a select few unknown species likely endured the worst of the asteroid

and even saw the world in some senses stabilize. During this time, mammals would have slightly increased in size, insects would have had a population boost, and large turtles plus crocodilians may have been the biggest animals around, making it one strange world for what dinosaurs were used to. And the paleontologists behind the study actually think it was these changes that ultimately led to their tragically slow ending, with mammals and non-dinosaur reptiles, eventually out-competing what remained of the previous rulers.

And while the end result with them being gone did not change, it would still be impressive if they had survived for an additional 33,000 years, which based on other calculations may have amounted to over 1,000 generations of dinosaurs, seeing the Cenozoic. Perhaps surprisingly, 33,000 years isn't even the longest estimate, with a few researchers having an even more optimistic hypothesis, suspecting that some dinosaurs survived for an extreme amount of time, possibly up to 1 million years. And interestingly enough, one of the strongest cases for such a long survival time comes from an area not so far from the epicenter, in Colorado and New Mexico. Specifically, a team of paleontologists discovered the remains of hadrosaurus, tyranosaurs, and kylosaurs,

and even saropods within a remote part of San Juan Basin that were dated to the Paleocene epoch, about half a million years after the initial impact. Of course, this brought up a bunch of questions about not only how did they survive so long, but why of all places did they only seem to survive in southern U.S., which is relatively close to the crater? Well, according to the lead paleontologist, there are three possible explanations. The first one is that the area they were in was heavily sheltered from the blast, perhaps being akin to a canyon that offered ample protection from the worst effects.

The second, more likely scenario, is that the diverse group of survivors wasn't originally from the states, but rather from up north, like Alberta, Canada, where the asteroid's effects were comparably less severe. Then, following the drop in temperature and decrease in resources, they were eventually forced to venture south, where presumably they stumbled upon a small area that could still sustain life. The final idea proposed was that no juvenile or mature individual survived the exchange. as they were simply too large, but instead their eggs that were protected by nests and were small, escaped obliteration and then hatched once the most immediate effects had passed, and then with a lot of luck they were able to reestablish themselves for half a million years.

If accurate, this means that these dinosaurs saw the Earth fully recover from the asteroid in most ways, and they might have actually ran into some new animals that emerged from that time, including freshwater eels, dysaccus, polydolopomorphia, Mesoenic, and, and and Pantadanta, to name a few. Of course, though, to no surprise, these finds have been met with a lot of criticism by the paleontology community overall. With the biggest pushback being that these dinosaurs were not from the Paleocene, and that their fossils had simply eroded at some point and were redeposited into younger grounds,

thus giving the illusion that they hadn't died with the rest of their kind. The researchers who made the original find have since come forward and defended their claims, saying that the bones could not have been moved around since many of them remained together, the most prominent example coming from a single hadrosaur, who had 34 of its bones arranged in perfect order. Nevertheless, this controversial discovery is mainly considered invalid today. Though, there are those who still hold on to the idea that dinosaurs stuck around for much longer than we usually give them credit, including the larger ones, like giant therepods. While very speculative, it has led to some interesting questions on how larger creatures

would have gotten by in a post-Mesezoic world. Would they have been restricted to just hunting other survivors unable to capture more agile mammals, or did they themselves experience changes, perhaps rapidly decreasing in size due to limited resources, as seen in the case with dwarfism experienced by animals on smaller islands. Ultimately though, no one is certain on how long our favorite extinct animals lasted, but it's nice to think that they stuck around for a bit. For now, though, the youngest dinosaur accepted by science remains a triceratops specimen who is thought to have died right around the time of the impact, perhaps even succumbing, like most to the blast itself.

The conversation on dinosaur survival has also led many to wonder if other Mesozoic icons persisted as well, such as the pterosaurs or mosasors. Currently, no one is a good idea, but there is a more obscure group of animals from those times, the ammonoids, that are thought to have possibly lived about one million years after the Cretaceous. This claim, like the San Juan Basin one, is quite controversial. Yet for the most part, it has garnered more support, and we can only hope that more finds in the future will give more clarity on the fate of the dinosaurs as well.

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