Was an asteroid the sole reason dinosaurs went extinct? New study claims they were already 'dying out'

Who doesn't know about the asteroid that killed dinosaurs? We've all pretty much grown up in the information that the otherworldly object was behind the extinction of the mighty lizards. But what if that wasn't completely true?

A new major study claims that dinosaurs were "already dying" back when they got wiped out by the giant asteroid.

When dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, their range of species was already drastically shrinking, as per the study done on dinosaur eggs in China.

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According to Mirror UK, the study, which was conducted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Using dinosaur eggs found in the country's Shanyang Basin it creates a two million-year chronology toward the end of the Cretaceous period, the last period during which dinosaurs were alive.

The central Chinese basin yielded some 1,000 egg fossils, but upon closer examination, researchers discovered that just three species were actually alive at the time.

It means that the diversity in dinosaur species was ebbing during the Cretaceous period.

“Our results demonstrate low dinosaur biodiversity during the last two million years of the Cretaceous, and those data indicate a decline in dinosaur biodiversity millions of years before the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary," wrote the authors.

This may imply that dinosaur populations were already in decline before they were wiped out by an asteroid.

It has been speculated that factors including climate change and volcanic eruptions may have led to the creatures' population collapse.

Events like the Deccan Traps eruption in present-day India would have also severely damaged the food supplies, which could have contributed to dinosaurs perishing.

(With inputs from agencies)

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