Dinosaurs were dying off long before asteroid hit Earth
5 April 2018 5:29 PM GMT
New York: Dinosaurs were in trouble long before the massive asteroid - believed to be the primary cause of their extinction - hit the Earth some 65 million years ago, a study suggests.
Researchers from the University at Albany in the US found that the emergence of toxic plants combined with dinosaurs' inability to associate the taste of certain dangerous foods had them already drastically decreasing in population.
"Learned taste aversion" is an evolutional defence seen in many species, in which the animal learns to associate the consumption of a plant or other food with negative consequences, such as feeling ill, researchers said.
"A reason why most attempts to eliminate rats have not been successful is because they, like many other species, have evolved to cope with plant toxicity," said Gordon Gallup, a professor at University at Albany.
"When rats encounter a new food, they typically sample only a small amount; and if they get sick, they show a remarkable ability to avoid that food again because they associate the taste and smell of it with the negative reaction," said Gallup, who led the study published in journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution.
The first flowering plants, called angiosperms, appear in the fossil record well before the asteroid impact and right before the dinosaurs began to gradually disappear.
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