Analysis of fossil remains of a herbivorous dinosaurs with long tail and neck, known as sauropods, found in the current Pyrenees, reinforces the hypothesis that the extinction of the dinosaurs was a gradual process rather quickly due to the large environmental imbalance caused by a meteorite impact on Earth. These sauropods, who lived at the end of the Cretaceous Period in Europe, maintained their diversity until it became extinct about 65 million years. The analysis of the evolution of their femurs shows a decline in diversity towards the end of the Cretaceous, just before their extinction.

While most of the scientific community believes that the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred after a impactase sized meteor into our planet, most of the evidence that exists on this event from the fossil record of dinosaurs that lived in what is now western North America. That collection, abundant and well known test that at least in that region of the world the extinction of these animals-usually-large was sharp and consistent with the impact of a large extraterrestrial object. However, what happened in the rest of the planet not so far too light. But a recent study by a team of scientists from the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology Miquel Crusafont at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​the Musée des Dinosaures (France), the Museu de la Conca Dellà, the Istituto Nazionale di Geophysics and Volcanology ( Italy) and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle d'Aix-en-Provence (France), on sauropod fossils found in the area now known as the Pyrénées, supporting the hypothesis of extinction caused by environmental disturbances caused by the meteorite impact about 65 million years. Sauropods were a class of herbivorous dinosaurs that had a long neck, long tail and walking on all fours. They lived in the Cretaceous Period in various regions of the world, including in Europe, where diversity remained until their extinction.


This work, led by researchers Aragosaurus group of Zaragoza, has focused on the detailed study of the femur bones found at other sites in the Pyrenees, south and southeast of France. This region in the late Cretaceous, was part of an island called Isla Ibero-Armorican and is one of the few places in the world that has found a fossil record that matches the end of that era, 65 million years ago . The study has proporcionad data on the number of taxa of sauropods that lived in the region of 6.5 million years before extinction. The analysis of these remains has determined that there is a great diversity in the last ten million years of the Cretaceous (Campanian and Maastrichtian), which lasted until the final extinction, which was sharp and consistent with the effects that would have the impact of a meteorite. If the dinosaurs had died out gradually, its diversity had been declining over time. This work demonstrates the opposite in Europe: the disappearance of sauropods occurred 65 million years ago, abruptly, reinforcing the "meteorite hypothesis" as the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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