#k pg extinction

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Purely asking for your speculative guess. Do you think we would still have non-avian dinosaurs if the asteroid hadnt killed them? Do you think they would have gone extinct another way or would they have evolved to work today? (Or at least in early humanity. I know a lot of animals are now extinct due to human hands)

100% nonavian dinosaurs would still be around. The question is whether or not humans would even have evolved - probably not, tbh. Like it's not impossible, but it's not likely. Dinosaurs would have had to deal with the changes of the Paleogene and Neogene like mammals did, but with their own dinosaur twist.

So like, the ones of the Maastrichtian would evolve. We wouldn't just have T. rex as is or something. But, Tyrannosaurs were thriving - maybe they would have still been around!

[pansylair]

WITH DEATH COMES LIFE (Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event) ((66.0 MYA))

[crocs-simp]

Camp Cretaceous season 3 truly was the epitome of benrius. The five course meals every episode, the parallel to yazsammy in the long run, ben making Yearning faces at darius every chance he gets, the constant hands symbolism, "i lLoVe yOu bUd", them coparenting bumpy, we truly had it all.

[joitiks]

and as the earth runs to the ground

oh, girl, it's you that i lie with

[bruesselbach]

Chicxulub (Paleofacture 25), July 2024, oil on canvas, 16x16in.

[fabrizio-art]

31 Mermaids, 2- Ghost

Ghost mermaids have been puzzling scientist and occult scholars; not really for what they could teach about death, but for what they seem to imply about the history of life.

To date, interviewed mermaids have never recognized a known ghost as a specific formerly individual. However, besides them only appearing at night and being mostly incorporeal, one ghostmaid has allegedly been tracked to her "manifestation site", which revealed a gigantic skeleton, or possibly several.

No proper exploration has been carried out yet, but what perplexes researchers is how the bones seem to be fossilized, embedded in layers of rock that have been dated to many different periods, invariably earlier than the K-Pg extinction boundary.

Ghostmaids sing like merfolk, but their vocal range extends far into the infrasound. This is theorized to be at least partially due to their size.

Neither land humans nor merfolk have been able to recognize a language or to ascertain whether words are present at all in the songs.

To date, one attempt is alleged to have been made at verbal communication by an independent researcher using advanced recording equipment and underwater microphone.

No information exists on the results, or the researcher's whereabouts.

[vickysaurus]

[vickysaurus-art]

I've got a geologic timeline running along the walls of my new appartment, so I made some icons to mark the mass extinctions on it! They depict the Big Five, plus the End-Ediacaran extinction, some in a more literal fashion and some more metaphorically. Detailed look and explanations in reverse chronological order below the cut.

Cretaceous Paleogene Extinction: Meteorite hitting the Earth.

End-Triassic Extinction: Pangaea split by a line of fire to show the future mid-oceanic ridge massively erupting as the supercontinent breaks up.

The Great Dying: To depict the worst extinction of all time, I drew the Earth as a skull.

Late Devonian Extinction: The Late Devonian extinction may have been set off by the evolution of trees completely changing how the world's climate and cycles worked. By breaking up rock into soil they released massive amounts of nutrients into the environment, leading to anoxic waters. They reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere, causing a temperature drop. The knock-on effects of all this, possibly combined with a volcanic period, resulted in a mass extinction. To try and depict the trees indirectly killing life, I drew them literally killing it with their roots. Some of the victims are lobe-finned fish, jawless fish, brachiopods, trilobites, crinoids, and cystoids. Another root is turning into an ice crystal and another into a very eutrophic pool of algae-infested water.

Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: This one is considered to be the result of an ice age, so I drew a snow crystal. The middle part is also meant to be reminiscent of a bright star, in reference to the (not especially probable) hypothesis that it was set off by a nearby supernova.

End-Ediacaran Extinction: I really struggled with this one, as it's still fairly poorly understood, but is thought to involve a major anoxic event. But how do you clearly depict a lack of oxygen? It's not easy without resorting to drawing choking humans or crossed out oxygen formulas and such. Instead, I depicted the results of it: the disappearance of the Ediacaran biota and their replacement with the more familiar creatures of the Cambrian. This is a trilobite crawling over the fossils of a Dickinsonia, Charnia, and Tribrachidium.

[captainjunglegym]

currently writing a fic about alex and henry living in an underground bunker for eighteen years after a chicxulub sized asteroid hit the earth and decimated the population

[ringofsecrets]

The harbinger of death hangs in the sky.

Tomorrow the asteroid will strike,

And with it, the worst day in all history

Many won’t even know it happened

Vaporized to quick for even pain

They’re the lucky ones.

Shards of molten glass

Ignite the forests with choking smoke

Tsunamis inundate vast swaths

The sun is blotted out

In a blanket of blackness

The freeze comes

The world will recover

But never again will the titans

Trod across continents

That’s in the future

For now the asteroid is a star

In a sky awash with a sea of light

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

So is the asteroid impact now the accepted theory for what happened to nonavian dinosaurs? I remember some time ago some scientists were debating if dinosaurs(minus birds) were still even around by the time the asteroid arrived; claiming they were already in decline due to diseases or some other natural reason. Their reasoning being they didn't find anything of the nonavian dinosaurs up to that point…which I feel is kind of poor reasoning since there's no way of finding fossils every single nonavian dinosaur that ever lived to begin with.

Yeah that's been debunked. In truth the Maastrichtian was a vibrant time for prehistoric life, and while some places had declines in diversity, it was not out of the norm - could be preservation bias, could be just a dip, which nonavian dinosaurs had had many times prior to that point and bounced back. But that asteroid explains the patterns of extinction we see very well, and why the nonavians are no longer with us.

[pansylair]

Made some mini prints (or postcards)! a while back for local sales that I forgot to post!

I’m going to do a short online shop opening within the next few days to sell some of these and some other merchandise like my K-Pg extinction sweatshirts. Fulfilling a large amount of orders really burns me out so I’m going to aim for staggered openings.

An extra reason for this brief drop is that my boyfriend is visiting again after 4 months apart in a wee bit less than a week! yay! :)

[blorbologist]

okay now that I've slept and delt with my headache, for completely benign reasons I'm thinking about Emhira, and how she compares to the raven-haired mage Patia knew over two centuries before.

The Raven Queen that ascended was an arcane master and follower of her predecessor, implied to live in Avalir. We don't have a confirmed class for the Matron's og self, but given she taught Patia I'd bet Wizard... which is a very different way of accessing power than a Warlock. And if she was trusted to teach the Por'co grandchild, presumably this woman was highly regarded indeed.

As much as Emhira is coming to Downfall with a unique perspective among the gods (as touched on in Cooldown, being a mortal who usurped a god AND death / fate being her domains), her perspective as a mortal was an outlier among mortals even before she ascended. Not just that she was the only one to pull off this ritual successfully, but in being in the upper class of a mageocracy in one of the most powerful flying cities to exist.

And now she has been living on the ground, under the supervision of her Champion, for decades. Her Champion who stepped onto Avalir with muddy boots and ranger leathers.

Is Emhira a likeness to the Matron's first body? Was she born to be herself again, only to be molded by cataclysm and suffering into a far more ragged, worn woman than she was before? Hell; was that mage in Avalir all that familiar with death at all, with magic always so close at hand? How has it been to see death and death and death around her, out of her control?

How does it feel, to have a name again for the first time in two hundred years? To not be a porcelain mask but a person?

Given this war between gods is an extinction level event (the ash covering the sun reminds me of thd K-PG extinction event, and also how are y'all growing apples??), I wonder if Emhira is just as changed as Asha is. Life is choked and slaughtered and dying, they are both sides to that coin. How frayed are the strands of fate?

Is Emhira more like the Matron, or more like the woman who came before them both? Or is she a third, more mortal thing?

[alphynix]

For a long time there were no hadrosaurid fossils known from Africa.

This seemed to mainly be due to the limits of the geography of their time. Hadrosaurs evolved and flourished during the late Cretaceous, when Africa was isolated from all the other continents, and they didn't seem to have ever found their way across the oceanic barriers.

…Until in 2021 a small hadrosaur was discovered in Morocco, a close relative of several European species, showing that some of these dinosaurs did reach northwest Africa just before the end of the Cretaceous - and with no land bridges or nearby island chains to hop along, they must have arrived from Europe via swimming, floating, or rafting directly across several hundred kilometers of deep water.

And now another hadrosaur has just been described from the same time and place.

Minqaria bata lived in Morocco at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 67 million years ago. Only known from a partial skull, its full appearance and body size is unknown, but it probably measured around 3.5m long (~11'6") – slightly larger than its previously discovered relative, but still very small for a hadrosaur. It might represent a case of insular dwarfism, since at the time Morocco may have been an island isolated from the rest of northwest Africa.

Along with its close relative Ajnabia, and at least one other currently-unnamed larger hadrosaur species, Minqaria seems to be part of a rapid diversification of hadrosaurs following their arrival in Morocco, adapting into new ecological niches in their new habitat where the only other herbivorous dinosaur competition was titanosaurian sauropods, and the only large predators were abelisaurs.

If the K-Pg mass extinction hadn't happened just a million years later, who knows what sort of weird African hadrosaurs we could have ended up with?

———

NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

[pangur-and-grim]

Your K-PG extinction risograph print is one of the most striking depictions of that event I've ever seen. The eerie red glow of their skeletons in the water same as the red glow from one "star" in the sky.

thank you so much!

I do get sad whenever I post it online because it was something meaningful to me, but all the comments are like “lmao at first glance I thought the dinosaurs had big floppy saggy titties” which kinda makes me feel gross and weird, so….. probably the lesson is that I need to develop a thicker skin and just focus on messages like yours!

[nutspider]

The trickster speaks in dead voices. Perhaps the old man knows it's a lie. Perhaps he can't bear to let her memory die with the rest of the world.

Villains (or at least one of them is) for a concept thesis film I've been playing with about an egg that hatches after the K-Pg extinction. An old, blind Quetzalcoatlus lured in and commanded by an opportunistic Troodon that uses mimicry to speak in the voice of the old man's dead mate.

Unable to let go of his grief, he acts as a weapon for his companion in exchange for their sight and hearing her voice again.