It was the end of the Triassic, and winter was coming. Fortunately for Arctic dinosaurs, they had warm feathery coats.
levels — this region also experienced harsh, frigid winters, with the lake at least partially freezing over. The evidence comes from the same rocks that bear the footprints. Analyzing the distribution of grain sizes in the rocks, the researchers determined that a large portion of the grains weren’t part of the original lake mud, but had been carried there from elsewhere.
Volcanic winters might last for tens or even hundreds of years, Olsen says, depending on how long volcanoes continue to erupt. In this case, the huge sheets of lava linked to the CAMP eruptions point to at least tens of thousands of, maybe even a million years. That could have kept the winters going for a good long time — long enough to drive many less-well-insulated reptiles off the face of the Earth, he adds.
too now suggests that the insulating fuzz has been around for even longer than once thought — possibly appearing as early as 250 million years ago, in a common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs . This study “shows the complexity of disentangling not only the success of certain groups, but also the causes and effects of mass extinction events,” says paleontologist Randall Irmis of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who was not connected with the study. “There’s a pretty good consensus that [the CAMP eruptions are] the cause of the mass extinction — but there are a lot of subtleties we haven’t appreciated.
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