Why did only dinosaurs go extinct after the comet/asteroid/meteor impact? How does that theory make sense?
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It’s not “only dinosaurs”; the C-T extinction killed 75% of all plant and animal life on Earth. Some things like small dinosaurs, small mammal ancestors, some oceanic fauna etc survives. Most didn’t.
They didn’t die from the impact. They died because the environment and climate changed.
Those dinosaurs were not abled to adapt, other species did, and they lived on and evolved into the animals we know today.
The theory basically states that the weather had a dramatic change. Turned much colder. As a result the normal food plants died off and as a result the animals that ate them died off too. As an example, if you look at the effects of Krakatowa volcano. The year without a summer.
Your question doesn’t make sense. Did you study at Ken Hovind university or something?
nuclear winter!….the sun was blotted out for centuries just killing off all life. If you notice the fossil record in the US, why are their hords of bones all at one place? a huge tsunami whiped out most of life around the world, followed by falling debris, nuclear winter…it was an apocalypse which nothing could recover so evolution had to restart again yet in conjunction with then new environment (less oxygen).
The general theory is that a large asteroid collided with the Earth and threw up a large amount of dust into the atmosphere which reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. This has two major effects it reduces the amount of plant growth dramatically and it cools the planet down. Now with less plants there is less food, either directly by herbivores not being able to find things to eat or carnivores not finding enough herbivores to eat, there would be a short period of a glut of food as the herbivores starved, but after that animals are in trouble, large animals need to eat a lot more food than smaller animals so they would be in the most danger. Warm blooded animals like mammals can generate their own body warmth, but Reptiles in general need to absorb warmth from the Sun to get enough energy to move swiftly around enough to hunt. https://youtu.be/tuUgrAOTmPo
Not all dinosaurs and their descendants died.
Birds are the descendants of specific types of dinosaurs.
The theory is that the meteor impact caused a lot of heating and thew up dust, ash and gasses into the atmosphere thereby dramatically changing the weather patterns on the entire globe for a few years. This is something we do observe in smaller scale today whenever there is huge volcano erruptions. The dramatic change in weather made it hard for big animals to survive as they had the biggest issues of adapting to the new conditions. For example if there is too much ash in the sky there may not be enough light for the plants so big grazing dinosaurs would be unable to find food. However a smaller mammal like a mouse might be able to get by by with the little food that is available.
There was also a theory that a series of supervolcanos was the cause of the extinction event by the same mechanisms as the meteor impact. However the most likely theory is that it was a combination of multiple things all contributing to the same effect. In addition to meteors and supervolcanos which might have caused some dinosaur species to go extinct there was also a breakup of the continents which disrupted migration patterns as well as a big number of new plant and animal species that might have been able to defend against the dinosaurs better.
The asteroid impact raised a lot of fine dust into the atmosphere all around Earth, that led to cold surface temperature and limited sunlight for several years. Some plants were not able to thrive, and huge parts of the biomass that relied on it brutally collapsed, dying from cold or hunger. The absurdly high energy demand of gigantic organisms was no longer met. The survivors were little sized organisms, designed to be energy efficient.
As the dust progressively dispersed, the survivors were able to repopulate the Earth as plant growth was accelerated by full access to daylight, and led to huge development opportunities for mammals, among others.
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