Several years ago, in the American detective series "Elementary", a whole series was devoted to the theory of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic fall of an asteroid 65-66 million years ago.
Neither before nor after that this theory was mentioned anywhere else and basically only paleontologists know and discuss about it. It doesn't even have a common name. In English, this phenomenon is called "Extinction debt" or "Dead Clade". Russian translators in the series translated it as "The Theory of a Doomed Taxon" (a taxon is a group of animals with common characteristics and properties).
According to the generally accepted scientific version, a huge asteroid that fell near the Yucatan Peninsula caused a mass extinction, which is called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. Along with the dinosaurs, sea lizards, huge mollusks and many other inhabitants of the planet died. It is believed that of the dinosaurs, only a few ancestors of modern birds survived the cataclysm.
However, sometimes, very rarely, paleontologists find the bones of ordinary dinosaurs, which, judging by the dates, lived much later than the fall of the asteroid. In science, these creatures are called Paleocene dinosaurs.
In paleontology, there is the term "Mark K-Pg", this is a place in the geological layers, indicating the period of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. The vast majority of the remains of dinosaur skeletons are found below this mark, because these dinosaurs did not survive a global cataclysm, but if the bones are located higher, then this is an anomaly or an error, or both. Or the layers are mixed. Why? Because this cannot be that dinosaurs lived after the fall of the asteroid. Most scientists think so.
Thus, the official science does not actually recognize the existence of Paleocene dinosaurs. And if he does, he calls them exactly the terms that we described above: "a doomed taxon" or "an endangered treasure."
What do these terms mean? Sometimes in nature it happens that a group of animals or plants exists for some time after their natural habitat has been destroyed or the reproduction process has been disrupted. Particularly witty scientists compare these groups with the "living dead", because no matter what their desire to live, they are actually dead anyway.
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In New Zealand in 1870, the bird species that were responsible for the spread of a certain type of shrub disappeared. Without these birds, the seeds of the bush stopped spreading around the neighborhood and the bush began to die out. However, he is still alive now and very slowly, but reproduces, since some seeds germinated without birds.
Many of the animals that are now classified as rare species have also practically turned into "living dead", as their natural habitat is inexorably destroyed or reduced, and these animals can safely live only in national parks or zoos under human supervision.
Thus, calling the dinosaurs who survived the asteroid as "living dead", scientists believe that these dinosaurs did not exist for long and soon became extinct, since they could not reproduce or find suitable food for themselves.
But it's not that simple. Several dinosaur bones are known to have been found in the Hel Creek Formation in a layer 1.3 meters higher than the K-Pg mark. According to paleontologists, these dinosaurs lived on earth about 40 thousand years after the fall of the asteroid.
Imagine 40 thousand years these animals lived on Earth. They ate, drank, multiplied. This is more than the entire known history of mankind.
The Hell Creek Formation is located in the northwestern United States, within the boundaries of the states of Montana, North and South Dacon. A lot of dinosaur bones were found in this place, and with rare exceptions, they all lay below the K-Pg mark. So that? Just an anomaly? But no, Paleocene dinosaurs have been found in China and other parts of the world.
In 2001, a hadrosaur bone was found in the Oho Alamon sandstone, from which particles of pollen were extracted. And the dating of this pollen showed that this hadrosaur lived about 64.5 million years ago. That is, at least half a million years after the cataclysm.
Doesn't sound like the living dead or the doomed taxon, does it? And if these "doomed" dinosaurs "died out" for so long, could some groups survive to our times?