Fossils confirm asteroid killed dinosaurs rapidly in Europe 66m yrs ago

A new fossil study has recently revealed that dinosaurs died rapidly in Europe 66 million years ago by the asteroid impact.

The theory that an asteroid rapidly killed off the dinosaurs is widely recognized, but until recently dinosaur fossils from the latest Cretaceous, the final stanza of dinosaur evolution, were known almost exclusively from North America. This has raised questions about whether the sudden decline of dinosaurs in the American and Canadian west was merely a local story.

The new study synthesizes a flurry of research on European dinosaurs over the past two decades. Fossils of latest Cretaceous dinosaurs are now commonly discovered in Spain, France, Romania, and other countries.

By looking at the variety and ages of these fossils, a team of researchers led by Zoltan Csiki-Sava of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Geology and Geophysics has determined that dinosaurs remained diverse in European ecosystems very late into the Cretaceous.

In the Pyrenees of Spain and France, the best area in Europe for finding latest Cretaceous dinosaurs, meat and plant-eating species are present and seemingly flourishing during the final few hundred thousand years before the asteroid hit.

Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences (UK) said that everyone knows that an asteroid hit 66 million years ago and dinosaurs disappeared, but this story was mostly based on fossils from one part of the world, North America.

However, now it's identified that European dinosaurs were thriving up to the asteroid impact, just like in North America and this was strong evidence that the asteroid really did kill off dinosaurs in their prime, all over the world at once.

The study is published in the open access journal ZooKeys.