Why didn’t the small post apocalypse survivor dinosaurs just refill the niches? Did the asteroid alter the planet in some way fundamentally different than the prior 200M years?
Edit: (collaborative clarification with my 5yo, with paraphrasing): Birds are boring dinosaurs. Why didn’t the big dinosaurs (non bird) come back? Why are there no mammal-sized (non bird) dinosaurs? (e.g., mouse through elephant-sized or even whale size)
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I suspect that part of reason why so many species die out was that the world had been a very stable place for a very long time before that impact.
Evolution and natural selection tend to make a species more attuned to its environment, better adapted and more efficient than the species around it competing for the same resources. As a species gets more and more attuned to that specific environment, it becomes less and less able to accommodate changes. Because things had been so stable (unchanging) for so long, species were VERY reliant on that stability. When something interrupted it, the most reliant died off.
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