Question: What effects did the extinction of dinosaurs bring?
Answer: Life on earth drastically changed
Explanation: What effects did the extinction of dinosaurs bring?
Well, for a start, 75% of all living beings that inhabited were wiped out, so life itself had somewhat vanished on the earth. Dinosaurs roamed the earth during the Mesozoic era, 66 million years ago. During this period which lasted for 186 million years, the earth had different types of dinosaurs. There were vegetarian, carnivorous, and omnivorous dinosaurs; there were big, huge, and small dinosaurs; some lived exclusively on land, while others could also spend time underwater or in the sky.
But this ended when an asteroid hit the coastline of Central America at high velocity; there was a huge blast and heatwave that polluted the air with different particles. This event brought along soot that traveled all along the earth, causing a partial blackout which firstly impacted plant life because there was not enough light for photosynthesis. Then the dinosaurs starved because they depended on plants to live. Carnivorous dinosaurs started to starve, too, because their food source became limited, and eventually, there was no food to be found anywhere. The lack of light also brought climate change, and during that time, there was known as an “impact winter.”
It took 300,000 years for marine ecosystems to be restored in the North Atlantic after the giant meteorite hit. Interestingly enough, life was restored faster when there was a crater from the meteorite. Within six years, marine organisms were formed; scientists confirm that a few minutes after the crater was formed, seawater with living particles flowed inside.
Many macrofaunae survived this ordeal, and animals that weighed less than 25kg or 55lbs and had low metabolic rates, survived the period of starvation which other larger animals couldn’t. After 700,000 years, legumes appeared, giving animals a protein supplement that helped mammals get bigger and more diversified.
Regarding light on the earth, twilight slowly became partial light in three years, and light reappeared after a few decades. When the sun returned to its usual intensity, photosynthetic phytoplankton produced more food for zooplankton and other large organisms.
