Antarctica was home to a large population of dinosaurs …
Until recently, scientists were not sure that anyone had ever lived in Antarctica - they say, there was a piece of ice for centuries and that's it … But new finds of dinosaur bones (in large numbers!) Partially broke through the information blockade, but scientists have already built a new "Maginot Line": they say, everything in Antarctica was a bundle (sun, sea, life and love), until the famous Mexican asterode fell 65 million years ago … And then it was definitely all extinct!
A new six-year study of more than 6,000 marine fossils from Antarctica shows that the global catastrophe that caused the death of the dinosaurs was sudden and devastating to living things at the poles. The fossils were discovered by scientists from the University of Leeds and the British Antarctic Survey on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region.
It is one of the largest collections of marine fossils of this age in the world. It contains a very wide range of species, from small snails and shellfish that lived on the seabed to huge and unusual creatures that swam in the surface waters of the ocean. These include the ammonite Diplomoceras, a distant relative of modern squid and octopus, with a paperclip-shaped shell that could reach enormous sizes, up to two meters long, and giant marine reptiles, as in the science fiction movie Jurassic World.
Most of the fossils are formed in the marine environment. In the rapidly accumulating sedimentary rocks, the bones or bodies of animals with hard shells are well preserved. In addition, the standing water kept the bones from decaying. And for the formation of fossils of dinosaurs or other land animals, a number of favorable conditions are necessary, which nature does not always fulfill …
The age-grouped collection of marine fossils shows a sharp decline of up to 70% in the number of species found in Antarctica 66 million years ago, exactly coinciding with the end of the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs and many other groups of animals around the world became extinct.
However, a number of previous studies have shown that the extinction of dinosaurs and other animal species occurred gradually across the globe - including in Antarctica. The fall of the asteroid undoubtedly made its destructive contribution, no one denies this, but …