How did Chicxulub kill all the dinosaurs, yet leave behind other species?
In: Planetary Science
It didn’t kill all the dinosaurs. It just killed a lot of them. You just dont tend to think of all the survivors as dinosaurs because they still exist.
Extinction events tend to kill off the most specialized (frequently biggest) species, while small generalists survive. Lots more than just dinosaurs also went extinct, and many dinosaur species survived. The ones that survived were small, and became the birds of today.
All known bird species are dinosaurs. They couldn’t have evolved to present day unless there were surviving dinosaurs the entire time.
The biggest effect around the planet was from all the dust the meteor impact threw up. All that dust decrease the sunlight getting through for decades. Less sunlight meant the huge plants characteristic of the age didn’t have enough energy to survive, so they died off. The large dinosaurs that ate those large plants died from lack of food. The dinosaur that at those large dinosaurs also died.
What survived were the small creatures. The small plants that evolved to live in the shade of their giant neighbors. The small animals that evolved to hide and eat those small plants, and the small predators that evolved to eat those small animals. The same goes for sea creatures.
Eventually the skies cleared and the bright sun reached the plants. Slowly they evolved to take advantage of all the new energy they suddenly had that was originally gobbled up by their overshadowing neighborhs. As those plants grew, the food web could support larger herbivore which could support larger carnivores.
It didn’t kill all of them, they went extinct eventually, as many many other species in the span of tens on millions of years.
It only killed the big dinosaurs
Big animals need more food. The meteorite (and possibly volcanic activity) means clouds of dust in the air. Clouds of dust in the air means less sunlight. Less sunlight means fewer plants. Fewer plants means less food. Less food mean big animals can eat as much. Not eating enough means you die.
Smaller dinosaurs evolved into modern birds
Small mammals and reptiles survived and became many other species.
things that could be underground or deep enough underwater, that were small or required very little to eat to survive, or that could eat the other things that fit this criteria
Because it killed much of the plant life, some plants take decades to grow while others just take a few weeks or months. Animals that could eat grass or algae were able to survive while the ones that required eating food from fruit trees probably died out.
>How did Chicxulub kill all the dinosaurs
It didn’t. It killed ‘most’ of them; generally speaking the big ones. But many species survived that.
Kurzgesagt has a couple of great videos about this:
Latest Answers