Why didn’t the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth also lead to the extinction of all other living species?
In: Planetary Science
The asteroid threw a lot of debris into the atmosphere/orbit which blocked the sun for a time and fell back as mini asteroids that heated up the atmosphere making the surface feel like an oven for a brief period of time. Animals that buried or happened to be under water when the earth became an oven survived.
After this stage, the lack of sunlight decreased the land vegetation for a few years. All land animals that only eat leaves died including most of the dinosaurs. Any carnivore dinosaur that ate these large herbivores also went extinct.
The animals that survived included smaller animals that didn’t need a lot of food, eats a variety of food including nuts and meat (omnivore), and buried or lived at least partly under water. This includes all mammal groups, of which three are still alive (placental, marsupials and monotremes) and three bird groups as well which are smaller dinosaurs.
Mammals had the advantage of being burrowers, omnivore diet and small. Birds had an advantage of being small, omnivore, and flying to find their food. Pterosaurs that tended to be larger than birds due to comparison with birds, all went extinct. A lot of reptiles survived because they were able to stay under water and cold blooded helped because they don’t need a lot of food.
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