Well i could be wrong so someone correct me if i am but i think the impact took such a tole that the large animals (dinosaurs) couldn't survive but small mammals, reptiles (which i think are what birds evolved from not dinosaurs) and amphibians and small animals like that could because they could feed on shit in the ground like worms. So basically the extinction allowed the small animals and mammals to finally take over and begin evolving because there were no more dinosaurs. But i don't know if i'm 100% right i'm just pretty sure i've heard something along those lines on like a t.v. show or some shit haha.
i like your Carl Sagan sig, but that Asian guy pisses me off when i see him on TV he is such a pompous know it all ass just thought i shared that with grass city.
not necessarily true. When meteors hit the earth they are moving at tremendous speeds and create holes many times their size. No one is saying that a meteor came down and punched a neat clean hole in the gulf of mexico. Remember the land forms were very different millions of years ago, including the gulf of mexico. A meteor a fraction of its size could have created a smaller hole which then formed into the gulf of mexico millions of years later. Also a meteor the size of the gulf of mexico would not "destroy" the earth, but it would certainly change a lot of land and the sea floor, and undoubtedly kill most if not all life currently on the planet.
I just want to say that dinosaurs were reptiles, and that I think the rest of your post is pretty accurate. When the light of the sun is blocked out by tons of ash and debris, cold blooded animals (like dinosaurs which are reptiles) might find it hard to continue to keep their body temperature up. Tiny warm blooded animals (like rodents which are mammals) might not have such a hard time.
The late genius Carl Sagan and many of his compatriots in the scientific field believed it wasn't the asteroid that directly led to the mass extinction of animals; it was the supervolcanoes that were triggered after the impact that hurled out so much dust that it blackened out Earth's entire atmosphere within a few days. Hence why surface-dwelling animals died off quickly and the species that lived underground were able to propogate their kind for many millenia afterward.
Thanks for clearing that up, i thought dinosaurs were considered reptiles but wasn't completely sure...like i said i didn't do any research to make that post was just trying to go off something i remember hearing or reading a while ago haha.
Yeah like I said everything was pretty accurate and even I'm slightly confused as to how some of those birds and tiny reptiles lived through the K-T boundary.
All the dinosaurs didn't die. Birds descended from dinosaurs, as well as crocodiles, alligators, gharials and the tuatara are amongst many others.