Norman MacLeod of the Natural History Museum in London and his team suggest that most dinosaurs died due to changes in the earthly environment some 65 million years ago than due to exotic visitors like asteroids. They studied the fossil record of extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period -- when the dinosaurs and many other species disappeared -- and now suggest that most died out gradually as falling sea levels and volcanic eruptions took their toll. Most palaeontologists believe that the mass extinction was the result of a dramatic change in climate caused by an asteroid crashing into what is now Mexico. There is "little evidence for a catastrophic mass extinction", he says while suggesting that the species died out due to several environmental changes. Most extinctions were caused by a drop of 100 metres in sea level, and when volcanic eruptions in India threw debris into the atmosphere ( New Scientist , Vol 154, No 2076).
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