Dinosaurs were thriving before asteroid wiped them out, landmark study reveals

Dinosaurs were thriving until the asteroid strike which doomed them to extinction 66 million years ago, a landmark study suggests.

Given that land-dwelling dinosaurs perished while mammals and other species survived, paleontologists have debated for years whether the long-reigning reptiles were actually in decline long before the city-sized rock crashed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico.

But a new study examining hundreds of fossils left over from a period of millions of years on either side of the asteroid strike indicates that dinosaurs were in fact struck down in their prime.