Dinosaurs died due to chilly seas

Saturday, April 24 2010, 15:40 BST
By Sarah Rollo, Entertainment Reporter

Dinosaurs were wiped out by a sudden drop in sea temperatures, new research reportedly claims.

Experts commonly believe that a cataclysmic event 65 million years ago - such as a comet strike - led to their extinction.

However, British researchers claim that a 16'F (9'C) drop in sea temperature more than 137 million years ago was the catalyst which eventually led to their total disappearance.

The study looked at fossils and minerals from the Arctic Svalbard, Norway, and concluded that the sudden change in the Atlantic Gulf Stream during the Cretaceous period would almost certainly have wiped out the ''abundance'' of the world's dinosaurs.

Gregory Price, of Plymouth University, told The Daily Telegraph that the drop was so severe that numerous species of dinosaur previously living in warm, shallow seas, land and swamps would have died out.

''We believe dinosaurs were most likely to be cold-blooded creatures and would have needed the warmth to keep them alive," he said. "If they were unable to migrate south they could have been wiped out. Climate change is now very much on the agenda in trying to determine how the dinosaurs became extinct. We now believe that they died out gradually and it is very possible that this could have been caused by a series of climatic changes."

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