How did the asteroid kill the dinosaurs?

Answer 1

The likely mechanism by which an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, was that the very large impact threw a large amount of dust and particulate matter into the atmosphere, which then blocked out the sunlight long enough to disrupt the existing food chain.

Answer 2

The most important feature in this answer will be because geologists found a separation in earth segments. Before that line, there were dinosaurs and afterwards no more. In that segment, just a few inches wide, they found high levels of iridium, which would prove an asteroid destroyed the Dinosaurs. Also; I would recommend you to read the dinosaur article on Wikipedia. Especially the paragraph on their extinction.

Answer2: Listing some speculations as to what happened to them, Princeton scientist G. L. Jepson stated:

"Authors with varying competence have suggested that dinosaurs disappeared because the climate deteriorated . . . or that the diet did. . . . Other writers have put the blame on disease, parasites, . . . changes in the pressure or composition of the atmosphere, poison gases, volcanic dust, excessive oxygen from plants, meteorites, comets, gene pool drainage by little mammalian egg-eaters, . . . cosmic radiation, shift of Earth's rotational poles, floods, continental drift, . . . drainage of swamp and lake environments, sunspots."-The Riddle of the Dinosaur.

It is apparent from such speculation that scientists are not able, with any certainty, to answer the question: What happened to the dinosaurs?

University of Arizona scientist David Jablonski concludes that 'for many plants and animals, extinction was abrupt and somehow special.Mass extinctions are not merely the cumulative effects of gradual dyings. Something unusual happened.' Their arrival was also abrupt. Scientific American observes: "The sudden appearance of both suborders of the pterosaurs without any obvious antecedents is fairly typical of the fossil record." That is also the case with dinosaurs. Their relatively sudden appearance and disappearance contradicts the commonly accepted view of slow evolution.

A more recent theory was put forth by a father-and-son team, Luis and Walter Alvarez. Walter Alvarez discovered, outside the town of Gubbio in central Italy, a curious thin, red layer of clay sandwiched between two limestone layers in the rock formation. The lower layer of limestone yielded an abundance of fossils. The top layer was almost devoid of fossils, leading the geologists to conclude that life suddenly disappeared and that the thin, red layer of clay had some connection with the extinction.

Analysis revealed that the clay was rich in iridium (a metal), 30 times richer than the concentration normally found in rocks. They knew that such high concentrations of this rare element could come only from the earth's core or from sources outside the earth. They concluded that the iridium was deposited by a huge asteroid that hit the earth, causing the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs.

After the discovery of the iridium-enriched clay at Gubbio, similar deposits were found in other parts of the world. Did this corroborate the asteroid hypothesis? Some scientists remain skeptical. But as the book The Riddle of the Dinosaur acknowledges, the Alvarez hypothesis added "fresh yeast to the study of extinction and evolution." And paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admits that it could diminish "the importance of competition between species."

Commenting on this new theory and the apparently sudden extinction of the dinosaurs, one science writer admits: "They could shake the foundations of evolutionary Biology and call into question the current concept of natural selection

Answer 3

The impact 65 million years ago was equivalent to a nuclear explosion of several tens of billions of tons yield (without the radioactivity). The sky was filled with debris for decades, blocking out sunlight and killing plants with cold and darkness. Dinosaurs starved in massive numbers, both herbivores and the carnivores that ate them.

Answer 4

The asteroid that supposedly struck earth did kill all the dinosaurs when it caused a 100 teraton explosion which killed many initially and then the later effects like firestorms killed even more. This is of course only a theory. Interestingly enough, contradictory to the first statement, dinosaurs still live today in the form of birds. So the meteor theory if correct, did not kill the dinosaurs COMPLETELY. To answer your question as for how birds survived, no one knows.

Answer 5

The impact of the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction created a "nuclear winter" situation that lasted over thousand years.