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Antarctic Fossils Reveal Creatures Weren't Safer in the South During Dinosaur Extinction

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday May 28 2016, @06:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-place-to-hide dept.
Science

Phoenix666 writes:

A study of more than 6,000 marine fossils from the Antarctic shows that the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs was sudden and just as deadly to life in the polar regions.

Previously, scientists had thought that creatures living in the southernmost regions of the planet would have been in a less perilous position during the mass extinction event than those elsewhere on Earth.

The research, published today in the journal Nature Communications, involved a six-year process of identifying more than 6,000 marine fossils ranging in age from 69- to 65-million-years-old that were excavated by scientists from the University of Leeds and the British Antarctic Survey on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula.

This is one of the largest collections of marine fossils of this age anywhere in the world. It includes a wide range of species, from small snails and clams that lived on the sea floor, to large 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 grow as large as 2 metres, and giant marine reptiles such as Mosasaurus, as featured in the film Jurassic World.

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  • (Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday May 28 2016, @07:10AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Saturday May 28 2016, @07:10AM (#351915)

    All the dinos disappeared off the face of the Earth didn't they? It's not like the suspense was killing us...

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Gravis on Saturday May 28 2016, @08:01AM

      by Gravis (4596) on Saturday May 28 2016, @08:01AM (#351922)

      All the dinos disappeared off the face of the Earth didn't they?

      nope. guess how we got birds. [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Saturday May 28 2016, @08:12AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 28 2016, @08:12AM (#351924) Journal

    TFA seems to say that Antarctica was "the southernmost regions of the planet" circa 67 million years ago. Is that so?

    [...] South America and Antarctica were still attached in the late Cretaceous and early Tertiary geological periods, or about 65 million years ago. At that time the Antarctic was a lush rain forest [...]

    —http://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/21/us/antarctica-yields-first-land-mammal-fossil.html [nytimes.com]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2016, @01:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2016, @01:40PM (#351974)

      it could still be the southernmost region of the planet. also, 65 million years ago the earth was a lot warmer, and there were no ice caps (and no winter in general I think), so everywhere would have been "lush and tropical" as far as we're concerned.

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 28 2016, @03:28PM

        by butthurt (6141) on Saturday May 28 2016, @03:28PM (#351985) Journal

        Yes, that could be. That's what I was thinking when I asked the question.