From the New York Times
The dinosaurs suffered a misfortune 65 million years ago, when a meteor that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico caused their death in a huge environmental disaster.
However, the dinosaurs were also the beneficiaries of a previous environmental disaster, which occurred 200 million years ago, and caused the destruction of a competing species, thus allowing the dinosaurs to take over the earth in the 135 million years between the two disasters.
New evidence discovered in a study conducted in British Columbia, Canada points to the possibility that the first extinction, which wiped out 80% of the species that existed on Earth, and took place at the end of the Triassic era and the beginning of the Jurassic era, took place in a "geological blink of an eye" - lasting between 100 years and 50 thousand, At most. According to the findings, there is a possibility that a fallen meteor is also responsible for this geological holocaust.
In the Triassic era, the dinosaurs competed with another species of lizard-like mammals, but the great extinction of the species at the end of the era, which also led to the destruction of many of the dinosaurs, provided them with the opportunity to take over the earth by destroying all members of the competing species.
"For some unknown reason, the dinosaurs barely managed to continue to exist, and the lizard-like mammals did not," said the study's director, Dr. Peter Ward, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington.
The researchers also discovered "football-shaped" coal molecules in the rock layer from the time of the environmental disaster. These are molecules that were not created on Earth, according to the researchers' hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, it is a matter that comes from a meteor that crashed, and was scattered on the surface of the earth. Researchers have recently been able to link molecules of this type to two additional cases of environmental disasters caused by meteor crashes that resulted in the destruction of species - the meteor whose impact led to the destruction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and a meteor impact at the end of the Paleozoic era and the beginning of the Triassic era, 250 million years ago.
These three cases of mass destruction are also related to eruptions and shopping, so if the researchers succeed in making sure beyond any doubt that the cause of all three is a meteor strike, then they will also have to provide an explanation for this unlikely coincidence.
Large-scale meteor impacts and large eruptions and eruptions, which caused hundreds of thousands of kilometers to be covered in a layer of lava, are both extremely rare, occurring only every few million years. Most geophysicists reject the obvious hypothesis - that it is the meteor impact that causes the volcanic eruption - because their calculations indicate that the meteor impact could not have caused such a strong reaction and could not in any way result in the release of enough energy to cause a rupture in the earth's crust thousands of kilometers away from the impact site.
In the latest study, the report of which was published in Science, the researchers examined carbon layers in rocks on Queen Charlotte Island in British Columbia. The rocks, made from tropical ocean sediments, are among the only ones to have survived the period in question without changes. The composition of the rocks also reflects the disappearance of many species of marine plankton at that time. These are features that were also discovered in rocks from the era of the destruction of the dinosaurs. "Maybe it's 50 thousand years or less," said Dr. Ward. "And maybe it's 100 years or less, in which the changes took place."
According to Dr. Ward, the fact that so many species were destroyed so quickly indicates that this was caused by the fall of a meteor or by the impact of a supernova that occurred very close to the Earth - an explosion of a nearby star that damaged the ozone layer that protects the Earth and exposed the surface to ultra radiation A deadly virtue.
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