Monday 25 April 2016

Dinosaur families fled Europe during the Mesozoic period, study shows

APRIL 25, 2016

by Brett Smith

While the news might currently be full of stories about people flocking into Europe, it turns out dinosaurs had a different idea.

According to a new study published in Journal of Biogeography, dinosaur families were streaming out of Europe during the Mesozoic Era, between 250 million and 66 million years ago. The study confirms previous theories that found dinosaurs continued to migrate around the world even after the split of the ancient supercontinent Pangea.

“We presume that temporary land bridges formed due to changes in sea levels, temporarily reconnecting the continents,” study author Alex Dunhill , a paleontologist from the University of Leeds, said in a news release. “Such massive structures – spanning, for example, from Indo-Madagascar to Australia – may be hard to imagine. But over the timescales that we are talking about, which is in the order of tens of millions of years, it is perfectly feasible that plate tectonic activity gave rise to the right conditions for such land bridges to form.”

How did researchers reach this conclusion?

For the study, the scientists used the Paleobiology Database, which holds every recorded dinosaur fossils from around the planet. Fossil data for the same dinosaur families from several continents were then mapped for various periods of time, exposing associations that showed movement patterns.


No comments:

Post a Comment

You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!

Related Posts with Thumbnails

ShareThis