Dinosaurs were struck down in their prime
Dinosaurs were not just killed off when the asteroid hit, they were struck down in their prime, suggests a new analysis of dinosaur fossils around the world. "Dinosaurs were just doing incredibly well at the end of the Cretaceous," says David Fastovsky, a palaeontologist at the University of Rhode Island at Kingston. The first dinosaurs evolved about 230 million years ago in the Triassic period. Early dinosaurs were generalists, and had evolved into no more than around 40 genera at any one time up until the late Jurassic, which began about 160 million years ago. But then diversity soared in the Cretaceous which followed. Fastovsky’s team has established that at least 245 dinosaur genera lived during the late Cretaceous period, from 99 to 65 million years ago.