Space Rock and Dinosaurs

William also sent in the link www.yahoo.com/news/dinosaurs-may-already-going-extinct-214432199.html … it begins by telling us a space rock struck earth 66 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs. It then claims dinosaurs had already began to go extinct – before the impact. This presumably was prompted by a paper last year which said exactly the opposite – that dinosaurs thrived right up to the impact. We are told a period of global cooling dated at 76 million years ago may have prompted the decline. Note the word 'may' as that implies, 'in their opinion' and 'trust me' etc. The same story is at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-dinosaurs-decline.html … It is a very clever piece of research, and no doubt time  consuming as they produce a graph showing how speciation rates dropped and extinction rates rose sharply in the last ten million years of the Cretaceous. It depends on how you date the sediments in which the dinosaurs are found. If they were laid down quickly their findings are a wasted exercise. If the uniformitarian time scale of the dates applied to the sediments are acceptable and then they are right on the button. Readers can make up their own minds. The paper was published by the journal Nature – see www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23754-0 or https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23754-0