"Herds of hadrosaurs with huge head crests and duck bills roamed ancient New Mexico for plants to eat, making sure not to end up underfoot a long-necked titanosaur or, worse, in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus rex. None of them knew that a seven-mile-long space rock hurtling toward Earth was about to kill them all. The asteroid impact triggered one of the planet's worst mass-extinction events, wiping out all dinosaurs but birds."
"Yet paleontologists still debate what exactly happened in the years before the impact: Did these reptilian rulers go extinct suddenly due to the cosmic collision? Or were dinosaurs already in decline before the impact, with the asteroid merely delivering the knockout punch? New precise dating techniques of a century-old fossil site in New Mexico are opening a window into the years before the collision. Dinosaurs were flourishing, not foundering, as kings of the Cretaceous right up until the end, according to the new study."
Herbivorous hadrosaurs, long-necked titanosaurs, and predators like Tyrannosaurus rex inhabited Late Cretaceous New Mexico. A seven-mile asteroid struck Earth, producing an iridium-laced dust layer that marks the end of the dinosaur age and triggered a mass extinction that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs and allowed mammals to diversify. Paleontologists debated whether dinosaurs were already declining before the impact or were abruptly wiped out. New precise radiometric dating of the Ojo Alamo Formation in northwest New Mexico indicates dinosaurs remained abundant and diverse up to the boundary. The iridium layer at that site was eroded, complicating earlier age estimates and fossil correlations.
Read at The Washington Post
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