Every schoolchild with an interest in dinosaurs knows that they vanished when an asteroid ploughed into the Earth 66 million years ago.
The impact plunged the planet into a nuclear winter, the sun blotted out by dust. Any animal larger than a suitcase, and every non-avian dinosaur, appears to have perished. The stage was set for a group of small, more adaptable creatures – the mammals – to inherit the Earth.
According to a new study, however, Tyrannosaurus rex and its contemporaries were already doomed. Even if the asteroid had missed, the study suggests, the dinosaurs would have been driven into extinction by a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions that lasted for nearly a million years.
We already knew that the vast “Deccan Traps” lava
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