Cretace

The scantiness of the record led to the widespread belief that dinosaurs were on their way out already when the KT impact occurred. In the late 1980s a paleontologist from the Milwaukee Public Museum, Peter Sheehan, decided to conduct an experiment. Using two hundred volunteers, he made a painstaking census of a well-defined, but also well-picked-over, area of the famous Hell Creek formation in Montana. Sifting meticulously, the volunteers collected every last tooth and vertebra and chip of bone-everything that had been overlooked by previous diggers. The work took three years. When finished they found that they had more than tripled the global total of dinosaur fossils from the late Cretaceous. The survey established that dinosaurs remained numerous right up to the time of the KT impact. БЂњThere is no reason to believe that the dinosaurs were dying out gradually during the last three million years of the Cretaceous,БЂ«Sheehan reported. We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as lifeБЂ™s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes ...»