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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All the big dinosaurs died in the extinction. In fact, _everything_ living on land that was more than a few kilograms died. Almost all the birds died too, it’s just that a handful made it through to repopulate. The mass extinction was very, very bad. The sky turned baking hot from reentering debris, everything caught on fire, then the sun was blotted out and temps dropped for years and surviving plants died, then the ecology was a mess for millennia after that. There just weren’t any survivors left to repopulate.
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