Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Dinosaurs wiped out rapidly in Europe 66 million years ago

Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago. 2015. Csiki-Sava Z, et al. ZooKeys 469: 1-161.


Dinosaurs flourished in Europe right up until the asteroid impact that wiped them out 66 million years ago, a new study shows.

The new study synthesizes a flurry of research on European dinosaurs over the past two decades. Fossils of latest Cretaceous dinosaurs are now commonly discovered in Spain, France, Romania, and other countries.

Dr Csiki-Sava said "For a long time, Europe was overshadowed by other continents when the understanding of the nature, composition and evolution of latest Cretaceous continental ecosystems was concerned. The last 25 years witnessed a huge effort across all Europe to improve our knowledge, and now we are on the brink of fathoming the significance of these new discoveries, and of the strange and new story they tell about life at the end of the Dinosaur Era." PR