Were dinosaurs doomed before the meteor? This is what a shocking new study reveals

Paleontologists have long questioned the state of dinosaur life before the mass extinction event that whipped out the species more than 66 million years ago.

Were the populations thriving or struggling to survive? Could different conditions have allowed dinosaurs to withstand the asteroid’s impact? While not all of these questions have been answered and remain hotly debated, a new study sheds light on the conditions for non-avian dinosaurs in North America leading up to the asteroid’s arrival.

The research team, made up of scholars from China, the United States, and the United Kingdom, tested a new methodology to estimate the population of different dinosaurs that is used in ecology today. Building on previous research that suggested that sampling bias in the fossil record might be leading paleontologists to unfound conclusions, the test applied new methods that are less reliant on the fossil record alone to estimate the populations of different species near the end of the Cretaceous era.

Specifically, the scientists were looking at the fossil record from the Campanian and Maastrichtian, which form part of the Cretaceous era, taking place between 66 and roughly 83 million years ago. This 17 million-year period, which preceded the extinction of the dinosaurs, has been a significant point of focus in paleontology, and the study’s findings point to issues in theories that depended highly on the fossil record.

Using occupancy modeling to estimate species populations, the researchers combined “paleoclimatic, geographic, and fossil data within a Bayesian occupancy modeling framework.” This additional information highlights the significance of the fossil record and suggests a weakness in its capacity to accurately reflect population levels for this group of researchers.

The fossil record might not contain the entire story

Understandably, some areas have a higher concentration of fossils because of the environmental conditions that evolved millions of years before humans uncovered them. The “restriction of the available sampling window” for areas of North America, explain the authors, “suggests that dinosaur preservation and subsequent detection were comparatively reduced in the Maastrichtian record compared with the Campanian, which has potentially skewed interpretations of dinosaur diversity dynamics,” reads the paper. In other words, although fewer fossils have been found in the Maastrichtian era, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the populations were widely different from those in the Campanian, where more fossils have been found.

This novel approach allowed the scientists to examine whether the observed decrease in dinosaur diversity before extinction was due to sampling bias or an unexplained feature of dinosaur existence, aside from theories on climatic changes that may have made their environments less hospitable. "

The researchers suggest that their findings indicate bias within the fossil record. Using the occupancy methodology, they found that populations underrepresented in the record are accounted for at greater levels in the models.

While many questions remain about the exact nature of dinosaur life in the millions of years before their extinction, these results show that it could be the fossil record that makes it appear that there was a serious decrease in the dinosaur population leading up to extinction, that would have represented a threat to their survival, even if the asteroid had never arrived.

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