'Cut down in their prime': Dinosaurs were thriving in Africa before the asteroid hit
66 million years ago, the last dinosaurs vanished from Earth. We're still trying to understand why. New fossils of abelisaurs — distant relatives of the tyrannosaurs — from north Africa suggest that African dinosaurs remained diverse up to the very end. And that suggests their demise came suddenly, with the impact of a giant asteroid . The causes of the mass extinction have been debated for two centuries. Georges Cuvier, the father of palaeontology, thought extinction was driven by catastrophes. Charles Darwin thought gradual changes in the environment and competition between species slowly drove lineages extinct. As our understanding of the fossil record improved, it became clear that the Cretaceous period (145 million years to 66 million years ago) ended with an extraordinary wave of extinction. Huge numbers of species disappeared, worldwide, in a brief period. The discovery of the 180km-wide Chixculub asteroid impac...