The Dinosaurs Were Actually Killed By Flowers?

    • TNN
    • Publish Date: May 3 2018 6:15PM
    • |
    • Updated Date: May 3 2018 6:15PM
The Dinosaurs Were Actually Killed By Flowers?

For a very long time we assumed that the impact of an asteroid collision around 66 million years ago was what killed the dinosaurs. Eventually, scientists deduced that though the asteroid was to blame, there was actually a chain reaction it set off that did away with 75 percent of all living species at the time.

Now, researchers say that while the asteroid was the coup de grâce, the dinosaurs were already slowly being killed by a bunch of flowers.

A recent study found that fossils of flowering plants we’ve uncovered actually date back to before the asteroid impact. Basically, plants first evolved to produce flowers when the dinosaurs were in the height of their dominance. The problem was, a lot of those new flowers were toxic.

The study’s co-author Gordon Gallup, from the University of Albany, says the dinosaurs may have been too slow to evolve a learned taste aversion to the toxic flowers. Most animals today know to avoid certain kinds of plants and prey that’s toxic to them, because it’s information that’s been burned into their genes over generations. But the dinosaurs weren’t as quick to learn, so they kept eating the plants despite it slowly killing them.

“Though the asteroid certainly played a factor, the psychological deficit which rendered dinosaurs incapable of learning to refrain from eating certain plants had already placed severe strain on the species,” Gallup says.

Interestingly, Gallup and his former student Michael Frederick also analysed birds and crocodiles, the modern descendants of the dinosaurs, to see if they could develop taste aversions. As it turns out, birds learn how to stay away from things that make them sick, but crocodiles will just keep chomping down until they flop over and die. 


What do you think about the new study?

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Pratyusha Satish Rao NATIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOL

It is such a wonderful piece of information. How do people even discover such things.

R SHRINIDHI Bhaktavatsalam Vidyashram

very new to me

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