Stupid dinosaurs choked to death on burning fossil fuels

Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure. The coastline is shown as a white line. A striking series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater. White dots represent water-filled sinkholes (solution-collapse features common in the limestone rocks of the region) called cenotes after the Maya word dzonot. A dramatic ring of cenotes is associated with the largest peripheral gravity-gradient feature. The origin of the cenote ring remains uncertain, although the link to the underlying buried crater seems clear. less Gravity anomaly map of the Chicxulub impact structure. The coastline is shown as a white line. A striking series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater. White dots represent water-filled ... more Photo: USGS Photo: USGS Image 1 of / 48 Caption Close Stupid dinosaurs choked to death on burning fossil fuels 1 / 48 Back to Gallery

New research says an asteroid struck an oil field in Mexico and the resultant fire and smoke eventually killed the dinosaurs and just about everything else (accept, of course, our mammalian rat-squirrel-like ancestors).

However, the scientists say, the extinction pattern — what went extinct (dinosaurs) and what didn't (crocodilians and us) — creates a conundrum.

"The process leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs and various marine groups such as the ammonites and most planktonic foraminifera, accompanied by the survival of mammals, birds, crocodilians, and other species, is therefore unknown," the scientists led from Tohoku University in Japan said in a study published in Nature's Scientific Reports.

They say the current thought that the asteroid that smashed into Earth at the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico formed condensed sulfuric acid aerosols in the stratosphere, "which reflected sunlight, causing global darkness and inducing cessation of photosynthesis, global near-freezing conditions (impact winter)" is wrong.

That kind of climate change would have killed far more than was killed, they say. Thus they look at the evidence again to see what mechanism would have killed somethings and not others. They came up with soot.

"The impact of the asteroid into the oil field launched an enormous cloud of smoke into the stratosphere from the Chicxulub crater," researchers write. The smoke didn't cause a total blackout, but varied across the globe and lowered the temperatures less than thought in many places.

"If darkness (no sunlight) had occurred for a few years after the impact, the resulting low temperatures would have caused extinction of the crocodilians, birds, and mammals. The cooling would have been mild to allow their survival on land."

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Consequently, they surmise:

"The stratospheric soot-aerosol (theory) can explain the extinction and survival pattern at the K/Pg boundary. Our results show that rapid global climate change can play a major role in driving extinction."

Okay. So, why did I call the dinosaurs "stupid"? Because they didn't know how to survive when other things did. They weren't stupid the way humans can be stupid — such as knowing an action will cause only harm and doing it anyway — they were just regular ol' stupid as in just not knowing anything.

Humans, on the other hand, started out as stupid as dinosaurs, but we know better now: Burning fossil fuels can change the climate too fast for species adjustment. So, now we are stupid in the uniquely human way: We know better, but are going to do it anyway, damn it.

And, so to creatures who become dominant and achieve intelligence in some few hundred million years from now and who start to dig up our species' civilizations and then the extinction barrier for dinosaurs ... to that creature, I say, the two epochs will look an awful lot alike.

Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook. If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.