Dinosaurs were thriving before asteroid, study finds

What happened

Dinosaurs appear to have been thriving before a giant asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, paleontologists working in New Mexico said Thursday in the journal Science. Experts have long debated whether the asteroid was the final blow to a dinosaur population already in decline or if it cut short a flourishing reptilian dynasty.

Who said what

Using “two high-tech dating techniques” on fossil beds in northwest New Mexico’s Ojo Alamo Formation, the paleontologists determined that a wide range of dinosaur species lived in the area within 380,000 years of the mass extinction event, a “blink of the eye in the geological record,” The Washington Post said. That implies “dinosaurs were still going strong up to the moment the asteroid hit,” not “gradually wasting away t