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FOSSILS ET AL.
Did the Fossils Lie? The Dinosaurs Weren’t in Decline Before the Asteroid
A new study challenges decades of assumptions about the dinosaurs’ final days — and why their fossils are so hard to find
You never forget your first dinosaur bone in the field. It was a chunk of a femur, sun-bleached and crumbling, barely peeking out of a slope that had been eroding for who knows how long.
We weren’t even on a formal dig that day — just surveying a region where others had found fossils before. I was there to observe more than collect, but the moment still stuck with me. Not just for the thrill of discovery, but for what it made me realize: fossils don’t just happen. They depend on a perfect storm of events that most creatures will never experience. A whimsical lottery.
That same idea, that what we find in the fossil record is just a tiny, biased sliver of what once lived, is at the heart of published in this April. And it’s turning a long-standing dinosaur extinction narrative on its head.
But why?
For years, many paleontologists believed dinosaurs were already on the decline when the asteroid hit 66 million years ago. The data seemed to…
